The problem is the utter lack of standards in the mobile industry. You have Symbian (Nokia, which is an utter nightmare to code for, and not much better to use), BlackBerry (locked down), iPhone (locked down, dumbed down), Windows Mobile (How do you want to crash today?) and now Android (too early to tell).

About the only standard, if you could call it that, is the Java MIDlet, which runs on Symbian and BlackBerry, and occasionally runs (but mostly crashes) on Windows. I’d really like to see this work, but until the respective platform makers sit down and accept that a) people don’t want phones that crash and b) people don’t want to be tied to a single platform, it isn’t going to happen.

You need the consistent user experience of the iPhone or BlackBerry, with the openness of WM/Symbian. That’s, almost by definition, impossible.

And once you address the platform makers, you have the carriers to deal with. Good luck with that.

Your phone, in ten years or so, will tell your car to unlock the doors and allow you to start, it will tell the car how you like the interior lighting, climate, and your seating arrangement, it will store trip data and help you in traffic. Your entertainment data will be on the phone as well as your communication stuff. In addition to a load of other applications we’ll talk about when the time comes.

Nokia knows this. Google knows that Nokia knows this. Apple is in it too, but I doubt they have the endurance. The race to the ubiquitous interface is on.

On a separate note, SugarTrip would be good for someone visiting a city and needing to know where are the best places to park.

The problem in all this is that there’s a grand total of one Android handset available to consumers and it’s not exactly flying off the shelves. For something like this to work, it needs to be ubiquitous. If I were Google, I would be whoring out Android ICE integration to every manufacturer before Microsoft eats this market with SYNC.