Bijan Sabet

A few thoughts about the mobile world

It’s been a pretty interesting couple of weeks since Android 2.0 & the Droid came out.

I’ve been meeting with a lot of entrepreneurs, startups and hackers that are working on mobile apps and services.

Sunday night is my night to make dinner for the family so I’m in a bit of a rush (pls excuse any typos). Here’s a few things i’m thinking about in the mobile world

1. I haven’t met any developers or hackers building Palm Pre apps.

2. Developers are getting extremely frustrated with the Apple App Store (understatement). I’m hearing it can take developers 4 weeks to get an update released. That’s dysfunctional.

3. Yet at the same time the quality of iPhone apps are just getting better. I saw a number of new iPhone apps that use the relatively new in app purchase and it’s paying off big time. Google needs to add this to Android.

4. I’m pretty impressed with the Android Market. It’s fast to navigate and find what you need. A number of iPhone developers are creating Android apps. They like Google’s open app store model, all the new hardware and Android 2.0.

There is an issue with the current review system in the Android Market. Some users will say an app is “sluggish” and others will say “best app ever”. I’m finding its mostly dependent on the hardware. That’s quite confusing to users and needs to be addressed somehow.

5. If I was in charge of RIM, I would be 100% focused on getting a world class webkit browser into the Blackberry yesterday. The blackberry browser is just awful compared to the iPhone, Android or Palm Pre.

6. I’ve been thinking a ton about Joe Hewitt’s latest post about mobile apps vs the mobile web.

7. A number of VCs don’t like the mobile world. They don’t like the carrier issues and some of the challenges with the lack of standards, gatekeepers and other stuff. Put me in the other camp. I can’t get enough of it and I’m more excited than ever about the possibilities.