The market of mobile devices and solutions is growing constantly. Recently the German BITKOM predicts a thriving tablet boom. Accordingly, more than 3.2 million units are sold in 2012. This is an increase of 52 percent. Sales are expected to rise to 1.6 billion euros. And also the trend towards mobile office and collaboration solutions has strengthened obviously.

The cloud is the backbone of mobile solutions

On a closer view it is clear that cloud computing is a guarantee of success for the mobile technology market and offers. The cloud allows providers such as Google (Google Play), Amazon (Kindle Android AppStore) and Microsoft (Windows Store) to deliver their customers the (for them actually-bringing added value) content such as books, music, apps, etc. anywhere and across devices. Unlike Apple, Google and Amazon have the strategy achieving its revenue mostly with content in particular and sell the needed devices at cost price. Also suppliers such as Samsung and LG recognized it and (plan to) have their own cloud offerings, to provide their customers with content or want to animate to store data and therefore want to lock them in.
But not only provider of mobile marketplaces use the cloud for their purposes. Even developers of mobile applications store their data more and more in the cloud instead locally.

Hybrid is the right strategic path

Wireless data connections continuing to develop rapidly but there are obviously still a lot of holes in the mobile (broadband) coverage. It is less about the inner cities, but the rural areas. Here are just still unstable or substandard connections (EDGE) available. And also the long-awaited high-speed standard LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not able meet the expectations or is overpriced for the masses.

Another point is reliability and trust while the mobile work. Ist the data respectively are the changes actually stored successfully or do I experience a surprise in the office? Especially when working in a moving train, it is strongly unadvisable working with pure cloud-based solutions.

Developers of mobile productivity solutions should therefore focus on a hybrid approach. The main work should take place on the mobile device. Any changes/ selected data is then in the event of a data connection synchronized in the background automatically (remember status messages). The ability to switch to an online or a cloud mode would be an option, for example to enable the real-time collaboration with colleagues.

No cloud, no fun.

Besides the development of mobile devices and operating systems such as Android, iOS and Windows Phone, the mobile market would not develop the way it is happening now without cloud computing. One the one hand the increase of powerful devices and more comfortable operating systems and apps are responsible for this progress. However, we should not forget that it is the cloud which created the possibilities for a seamless and device-independent access and synchronization of content.