For some time now, people have been enthusing about the development of innovative mobile devices by referring to the "mobile revolution".

But Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently spotlighted what he calls the "real mobile revolution", which he says has only recently begun.

He points to a fundamental shift that has united smart phones and the most simple of phones, and which makes 2011 different from just a few years ago.

Asia's mobile community is converging on the open Internet from all sides, whether it's through the SMS, smart-phone browsers capable of rendering all Web pages, or open-source operating systems like Android. In all cases, innovation can quickly spill across devices and platforms.

It hasn't always been that way. In some countries, phones with inventive functionality were introduced but were unable to interact with either the Internet or phones on other networks. In others, each new phone brought with it new software requirements for developers.

"In fact, it was not so long ago that we at Google were spending as much time trying to make our mobile maps application work on different phones as we spent actually improving the product itself," Schmidt said.

It's now a completely different picture. On the high end, the smart phone supplies an open platform that any developer or manufacturer can use, and Asia is grasping the opportunities it offers. People in China are the world's second-largest downloaders of mobile apps. The expectation is that Asia will become a global hub for app development in a few years, he said.

Both Japan and Korea can boast truly international hits for iPhone and Android that would have had trouble catching on across borders a few years ago. As the smart phone gets cheaper, this power will spread across Asia.

Both the insurer creating SMS-based insurance and the Japanese developer making a photo app for Android can take that technology across the globe in a flash. And for that reason, openness is a much surer foundation for Asia's mobile Internet than closed, walled gardens.

"We should never underestimate the power of being able to send information without worrying about barriers. In October, the prime ministers of Cambodia and Thailand resolved a minor border crisis via a back channel. Was it a red telephone attached to a hotline? No. It was an exchange over SMS," Schmidt said.

"I even heard a crime story from Cambodia recently that illustrates both how not to use your mobile phone and just how far advanced the technology is in Asia.

"A man in Phnom Penh tried, but failed, to extort some money from his ex-employer with an anonymous death threat. The Cambodia Daily explained that his main downfall came from asking his victim to transfer the money to his Wing account - a system that allows for money transfers to and from mobile phones. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it's probably best to leave your personal phone out of things when you're sending someone threats by SMS. But I guess this guy wasn't all that clever. His phone, on the other hand, was incredibly "smart". This small-time crook was using a service that would be the envy of many people in the United States, where the majority of transfers still have to be done by paper cheques, even in a country that's rapidly embracing smart phones that can take full advantage of the Web from anywhere," Schmidt said.

He said Asia had been a leading innovator in mobile Internet technology for years. On one hand, there are places like Japan and Korea, where people were paying for train tickets and streaming movies with their mobile phones years ago. On the other, there are clever people across Southeast Asia making the most of the SMS as a simple but powerful lever to exploit the Internet's banks of servers, turning their phones into computers.

Farmers in rural India can check agricultural prices from the fields, while several Asian companies have used mobile phones to deliver financial services to enormous swathes of the developing world, where banks have refused to go. G-Cash of the Philippines is one famous example.

In Kenya, using SMS, people can buy weather insurance and receive automatic payouts directly to their phones if the rain doesn't fall within a specified time. A company in India has built an entire mobile operating system around SMS-based apps, including Google and Facebook. The SMS is very much alive and well, and doing more than ever before, he said.

"We expect a billion people will be using inexpensive, browser-based touch-screen phones over the next few years," Schmidt said.