Is innovation on the mobile platform dead?

I have been reading an interesting article this morning and would be interested to hear people's thoughts on the subject. Many of you will know that in the past I have, through various channels, been vocal about what I see as road blocks to Flash Lite taking hold in the mobile ecosystem as I know it can. But what about looking past just a particular platform (Flash Lite, Java, Symbian, etc) and looking at the mobile industry itself.

Ewan MacLeod over at SMSTextNews has written a somewhat bleak piece about what he sees as a failing of the mobile industry to foster innovation over the past 10 years or so. The title pretty much says it all - "Trapped in Mobile Hell - A Warning for Entrepreneurs".

It's certainly not an encouraging discourse, but from his point of view it's an honest assessment of where things are truly at. More to the point, it's an opinion about how much longer the mobile "phenomenon" will actually take to become the powerful platform that we all believe it is.

As a entreprenuer myself (having started a number of businesses now in the tech space) and being particularly entrenched now in the mobile space with Moket, it's pretty hard to argue that the past 4 years especially have been anything but very difficult and nothing like what we had "assumed" in our business modeling and projections. Is this, as Ewan says, the "reality" of the mobile business model, or are there business models that can be pursued that will in fact deliver rewards?

I don't expect any quick solutions, however I must say that within our own business, things have started to take on a different complexion over the past 6 months - for the better. While it's really no more difficult than what it has been to squeeze revenue from the industry business models we have to work with (the operator/aggregator/provider model for one is a real killer for revenue), there have been some shifts in attitude towards Flash Lite in particular that have made me more optimistic.

But the question remains - can real innovation occur in the mobile industry at a rate that will promote great new ideas, or does the mobile business itself kill start-ups? Over to you ...