A Conference Keen on Finding Open Communication

In the world of mobile phone applications, Apple, Google, Nokia and their competitors seem to have only their differences in common.

Most mobile software works on only one type of device or the phones of one carrier. An iPhone application will not work on a Nokia phone, and neither would work on Google's Android system or Microsoft's new Windows Phone. The state of play, experts say, is a cacophony of incompatible software that threatens to slow the growth of the mobile Internet. Companies in this field that are attending the Mobile World Congress here this week are holding sessions to educate software developers on the idiosyncrasies of designing apps for their phones. The competition is similar to what happened in the earliest days of the personal computer industry, when a program bought for, say, a Commodore 64 would not work on a Texas Instruments PC.