By now you're probably all tired of hearing about my inferiority complex, so I'll stick to the point: others who have been watching the field longer are much much MUCH more qualified to predict the future of specific devices than I am. You can find their musings here.
In more general terms, though, I am willing to gamble that I might actually know what I'm talking about.
1) The iPhone will happen this year. Steve Jobs has done a nice little Dance of the Seven Veils in 2006, but Apple needs another home run to maintain its share price. People probably won't be laughing at the Zune for much longer.
2) Mobile DRM will weaken in a major way. Too many commercial forces are bearing down on companies that need short-term gains to justify their share prices. Right now, the biggest problem mobile faces is the lack of a universal format, and DRM is the biggest single obstacle to that. It won't collapse-- still too much influence from the Big Six for that-- but it will weaken.
3) There will be no breakaway hit in mobile entertainment that forces its way into mainstream culture the way that the iPod has forced mainstream culture to start caring about music players. This is a gut feeling. I just don't think we're ready. But hey, hits matter less than they used to.
4) There will be a breakaway hit in user-generated mobile content, a sort of mini-YouTube. If social networking continues to go mobile, this seems like the logical next step... there never would have been a YouTube without the MySpaces of the world to nurture it.
5) The mobile content industry will go through a serious recession sometime this year... This prediction is tied firmly to a non-mobile prediction: this will be the year that Americans stop kidding ourselves that anyone, Republican or Democrat, has any easy answers for the mess we're in. Consumer interest in luxury items (including almost all mobile content-- sorry) will fall accordingly and the repercussions will be felt throughout the global marketplace. Corrollary: China, Japan and Korea will gain share faster than generally expected.
6) ...But moco will be back on the upswing by the end of the year. Spasms of consumer doubt are useful periods of natural selection. There's a lot of empty hype in moco, but it really can compete with other forms of entertainment. I believe this, but I can't prove it. Only a period of economic scarcity can do that.
You knew they had to be good for something.
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