Will mobile applications kill Web 2.0 freebies?

Since the launch of the iPhone, the application development scene for mobile handsets has gone ballistic. My history is most likely wrong, so don’t be pedantic, but Symbian and Windows Mobile drove the mobile application market with its Java and Win32-driven applications way way back in the day when phones first added cameras in the form of 0.3 megapixels.

Many years have passed and the ice caps are melting, highlighting a change of era and today we find iTunes app store carrying hundreds and thousands of applications to install on your iPhone. Most of them are pointless and will be used at most three times, but that is not the point, is it? The point is that mobile convergence has peaked at a level of application-driven services available cheap, if not free, to the masses.

Nokia recently launched two services that are of particular interest, Nokia Comes With Music and Ovi — Nokia’s shot at applications, services and even cloud-computing projects. Ovi traffic was so phenomenal on its first day that it crashed the servers and many couldn’t access the service. This week, Nokia launches the N97, the newest flagship in the Nokia stable. Google has just launched the Dream locally and iPhone 3.0 is not far off either.

All premium handsets with convergence written all over them! The evolution of mobile was inevitable and when hardware revenue models died off, handset manufacturers had no option but to turn to service-driven revenue models. That statement is quite interesting: the manufacturers turned to services and not third parties, like in the case of desktop and laptop manufacturers who tend to stick to hardware and leave the software and services up to the others.

The real question now is as the internet becomes more contextual and mobile handsets become more service-orientated, when will users become reluctant to pay for mobile services, much the same way as users are reluctant to pay for any web-based services in this web 2.0 world we live in?

Lance Ulanoff predicts the end of free web-based services. Could this mobile app-store model drive this shift backward and take society into a time machine back to a time when paid services were cool?