2008 will be an exciting year for the mobile industry. I am eagerly awaiting the upcoming events of in the mobile space this year.

In the area of service delivery, I am optimistic that the world will see a more open network that will provide better services to the users.  In North America for instance, Google’s aggressive move into the mobile space will surely have a great impact on the openness of the mobile network in North America.

I am optimistic that we won’t be seeing an $85,000 phone bill anymore in the news. The results of the bidding on the 700Mhz frequency space that will be vacated by America’s direction towards digital television will be a defining direction of how open the North American mobile network will be.

The upcoming open mobile platform, Android, in the area of mobile phone software will be the open source community’s  major contribution to providing a better means of providing services in the mobile world. I am hoping that the innovation brought by the open source community will rub into the mobile industry.

With a growing number of mobile phone users in Asia (especially China), I hope that Google’s Android can be the Asian phone manufacturer’s mobile phone platform of choice.

I still think that Google’s choice in choosing Java as the primary development language for Android applications will not fragment the mobile Java community. But this will take a while to evolve. In the mean time J2ME will continue to provide a stable platform for the existing users.

It would be an industry boon to see what JavaFX and Android combine will be able to provide for the mobile users at large. A single coherent mobile Java platform for the billions of mobile phone users is such a great motivation.

On the mobile hardware end, I expect that we will all be seeing an Android mobile phone soon. I will not be surprised if HTC or Motorola will showcase an Android mobile phone in the upcoming GSMA Mobile World Congress to be held on February 2008 in Spain.

It would be nice to see mobile phones sporting the recent developments in mobile technology. Imagine a mobile phone with a 1Ghz processor, dedicated 3D/VPU chip, 32GB storage and high resolution screens. Technologies like High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is pretty exciting (now we’d be able to upload video a lot faster and two-way video communication will have a big boost).

There are also some things that as a mobile phone user, I would like to see improvements on. For instance, I would surely like to see a universal standard for chargers and headsets. It just make sense for instance to have a universal headset connector across all mobile phones. Chargers should also be standardized. Another great improvement would be is being able to standardize the rechargeable battery.

Opening up the mobile phone network will surely have it’s major concerns. Already, things like privacy and security should be addressed. One thing I like about the current J2ME platform is the security. No software is allowed access to data or network resources without the user’s explicit permission.

At the end of the day, all these technology should be working for what the user wants and needs whether it’s communicating with someone, taking photos and videos, listening to music, watching videos, browsing the Internet, blogging, reading electronic books or playing games.