There's another theme that was big at Lotusphere: mobility and smartphones. Not only were there a bunch of Lotus and partner announcements, everywhere you went, you saw people using them. Even while standing around having a conversation, most participants had a phone in the hand, too, probably checking the 'Sphere twitter streams.

This trend isn't going away, and there were even some prophets suggesting that the smartphone will replace the laptop as the weapon of choice for many people, and as the prime interface for many business applications, too.

I'm not sure I subscribe to the former idea. I can't see the current awkward two-thumb typing interface on a small device replacing a keyboard, but then I could also be wrong, and maybe voice will become the large-scale data entry vehicle with future smartphones.

But as was obvious from both products and sessions, custom mobile business apps, and partner apps that work on mobiles are here to stay. For example:

• BlackBerry launched their new Quickr and updated Connections products just before Lotusphere. Pity they appear to need another back-end server to support them, though.
• Teamstudio announced an XPages toolset, Voyager, that will you to use XPages to design apps for Blackberries, and which will support offline as well as online capability.
• Lotus said that a future release of Traveler (oh, how I hate the American spelling!) will support Android phones, starting with the Nexus One, in the second half of 2010. I'd speculate that this will come with Notes/Domino 8.5.2.
• Lotus have a new iPhone product, Traveler Companion. This is free, already available and, by all accounts, a popular download on the iPhone App Store. It adds encryption capabilities to Traveler on an iPhone.
• Lotus also announced future Nokia Symbian features, including Sametime presence awareness and Sametime Unified Telephony integrated into the device's address book, to be available sometime towards the end of 2010.

Can we talk?
Another pervasive theme was collaboration itself. That's not a new theme to Lotusphere by any means. After all, it's one of the founding tenets of Notes itself.

But there was much more emphasis on the value, and indeed the whole point, of collaboration from a more social perspective. It can't be lost on Lotus that having started the whole collaboration software business, their lead has been somewhat eroded recently by things like Google Wave, and even SharePoint.