A comment on social moblie apps

In the past few years I've seen a whole load of social mobile apps, such as Sensor (was a bit involved in that one), and more recently fotochatter and 6th Sense.

I think most of them are clever and work as advertised. But, all seem to be based on a Symbian or Windows Mobile app for a smartphone and thus suffer from a crucial weakness - density of devices.

All of these apps (they are not services, yet) require that a person be nearby with the same app running. Therefore, there needs to be a high enough density of folks with the right phones in the right places with the right app.

Uh uh.

Having used various of these apps, I have felt very lonely, even in the mobile crazy halls at Nokia. There just isn't any penetration of these smartphones to a significant degree to make these apps useful.

I've seen some ideas of how to get around this limitation, but all of them still expect someone to have a smartphone.

Here's my proposal, forget the smartphone and deploy something that can be used with simple Java phones. Indeed, I've seen some cool stuff there, too, but nothing out in the wild, yet.

It's so easy to make an app for a smartphone and say you've got a winner. But the reality is that there are about, oh, 600 million phones out there being sold this year that will not be smartphones (which themselves should amount to no more than 10% of the total market for new phones).

What say you?