Today’s fun CIO game: ask all your happy BlackBerry users how many of them have ever managed to successfully download an app. Yes. Scary, isn’t it?

For a world that talks about a billion apps downloaded on the iPhone, where we have all sorts of ever-smarter smartphones and PDAs, where we are all expecting and expected to be constantly wired-in to a seamless information superhighway – there are still shall we say a few hurdles left before we get to complete mobile nirvana.

Take Apple’s public act of Maoist self-criticism this week about the state of the iPhone 4, which has at least as many bugs in it as a four day old yoghurt, frankly. Take the fact that the standards battle between Android, Apple, Kindle, insert your fave brushed steel or matt black device name here hasn’t even become a proper war yet, let alone been settled.

If you thought that all the issues about multi-channel and easier re-purposing of content for delivery over whatever medium the CEO likes this week is all long since sorted out, you haven’t met Shaun Barriball, CEO of UK mobile web and mobile app middleware specialist Mobile IQ, a Basingstoke-based success story which has clients like the BBC, Channel 4, Maxim and The New York Post on its roster.

"We have a database of 4,700 distinct devices content can go to – and they are all different," Barriball told CBR, before making our heads spin with all the work that has to go on with content-managing, cataloguing, video-encoding and asset tagging for the sort of New Media LOBs his firm works with.

This is the firm, incidentally, that did the BBC News app that you may have on your iPhone and is behind the software that makes The Guardian readable on your smartphone, too. And Barriball is happy, it’s a great market to be in – smartphone usage has increased by 200% in 2 years and now accounts for 46% of all mobile traffic, he says, and he quotes the stat that Apple is demanding a minimum of $1m per ad campaign stump-up on the new iAd platform. Some 45% of users of the BBC News app use it every day and 72% at least every 3; this is a very healthy and growing market.

But it’s a complex one – and not getting any easier. He has to create 12 versions of every bit of video to support all the devices he needs to and as mentioned, he has thousands of handsets which differ in terms of screen size, features, etc to tailor for, too.

You may think this is all Sarah in marketing’s problem – she’s the one who wants to get the company’s new campaign onto the App Store, it’s her own trouble, right? Barriball thinks it’s soon going to be yours, alas: "Yes, the majority of our sales are into lines of businesses but we are also getting more calls from chairmen of companies who want to be on the new handset they just got upgraded to – so I do think this will soon be the CIO’s problem, yes."

Fragmentation of the market is the issue. A firm like Mobile IQ can help you with some of that – be that using the mobile web or working on an app for one of the many, many app-hungry devices, of which there are literally more every day.

But at some point you’re going to be landed the problem of how to create an information management framework for company content and branding and it’s going to make working out what the heck CORBA actually did look like writing your first ‘Hello World’ program in BBC Basic.

Unless you stick to the BlackBerry – the de facto business smartphone that half your users don’t really know how to use. Yeah – good luck with that one.