The success of Apple’s iPhone is attracting host of other companies into the smartphone segment.  Besides the traditional mobile phone manufacturers, traditional PC makers are also eying this buoyant market segment with great ambition.  The devices they are creating are becoming more powerful and  feature rich.  These smarter mobile devices, coupled with increasingly ubiquitous wireless broadband networks, point to an emerging revolution in personal computing.

The BBC News website takes a look at the mobile future and examines how the mobile phone is slowly taking over the mantle as the centre of your social and multimedia experience.

I myself have been using one as my primary mobile phone for the past three months. From my experience, the hype and excitement surrounding the iPhone is justified – mostly. Sure, it is not the most feature-rich of phones currently available: no SMS forwarding; no video capability; no stereo-bluetooth; etc. Overall, though, I must say that it has been the most competent and intuitive smart phone I’ve ever used.

In my opinion, the two areas in which the iPhone excels are accessing the Internet and synchronizing data. The iPhone’s web browser, which is a mobile version of the Apple’s Safari browser, is far superior to those found on any other mobile phone. It is no accident that a far higher percentage of iPhone users access the web regularly compared to any other mobile phone.

Having struggled to keep my personal information synchronized between my PCs and a variety of mobile devices over the past decade, I am also well and truly impressed at how effectively Apple has implemented this potentially frustrating process. Dock your iPhone with your Mac and your email accounts, calendars, contacts, music and photos are synced with minimum fuss – no messing about with complex configuration options or dealing with frustrating sync conflicts.

The iPhone will definitely evolve into a dominant mobile web platform fairly quickly. I believe it is already the best smart phone option for small businesses wishing to make their workforce more mobile and productive.

Online gaming dominates the local content market now. Other content services include online music and videos. However, it is online gaming that has taken off significantly here, driven by the popularity of community focussed MMOGs (massively multi-player online games).

Singapore’s planned next-generation National Broadband Network will certainly give the online content market a fillip by making it more feasible to provide bandwidth intensive services such as Video-on-Demand.

However, I personally feel that it is the new mobile devices coming onto the market that will really boost the market. Apple’s iPhone has shown how a truly mobile device can effectively tap into the Web. Some of the 1st-generation applications on its fledgling App Store already demonstrate how ubiquitous, always-on connection to the Internet can be genuinely useful.

Most of the successful mobile apps do not require massive bandwidth or production infrastructure . Instead, the critical factors are to have relevant content and to present it intuitively through well designed user interfaces. Providing such relevant, localized & niche content is a field where you don’t really need to be big to succeed. So, I do expect that small businesses can take a big bite of the SGD 165-miilion online content market come 2013.

The release of the SDK will mean many more developers will be drawn to creating software for the increasingly popular device. And to jumpstart the development of applications apple has announced – in association with verture capitalists KPCB – $100 million ‘iFund’. According to KPCB, “A revolutionary new platform is a rare and prized opportunity for entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what Apple has created with iPhone and iPod touch.”

At the same time Apple also announced that the company has licensed Microsoft’s Active sync, allowing the devices to transparently communicate with Microsoft Exchange Email servers, like those used by many small and medium sized businesses. This move alone will likely draw a lot of disaffected windows mobile users away to the iPhone.

Since the iPhone was released observers have noted that the device seemed an ideal gaming platform, but Apple has traditionally not actively courted the gaming market either on it’s desktops or mobile devices. At yesterdays presentation, however, EA demonstrated a version of Will Wright’s long awaited Spore running on the iPhone – a move that will create more buzz in the gaming market than anything else they could possibly have done. Jobs brought executives from EA and Sega onto stage, both of whom gushed about the platform, and how much they were able to create in ‘only two weeks’ working on it. It’s interesting to interesting about that is that in Feburary, Apple announced that SDK release would be 2 weeks later than originally announced.