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A group of persons interested in the plight of mobile application developers and content providers will gather at Sun Microsystems headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. Friday morning to discuss how to get concerns addressed.

The idea is to gather feedback on issues faced by developers in dealing with telecommunications carriers and others in getting their products up and running on different handhelds.

"The bottom line is it's hard to create content, to deploy it, to monetize it," said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community, at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference on Thursday in Santa Clara.

Barr also broached the subject of the formation of a mobile developer alliance on Wednesday at the conference. Attendees of the conference can attend Friday's meeting as well.

Friday's event will be a grassroots session on how to proceed with addressing the different players to get them to move on developer concerns.

"Unfortunately, the mobile developer has no lobby," and the playing field is tilted toward the original equipment manufacturers and telecommunications carriers, Barr said.

While the world awaits an ear-candy update from Steve Jobs at this week's Macworld, the iPhone's most likely long-term mobile buzz disrupter, Google's Android platform, received a boost from a small California-based development firm that will tomorrow announce a complete suite of phone apps based on Android, according to a report today on USA Today's Web site.

[ For an in-depth look at the Android SDK, see Analysis: Long odds for Google's ambitious Android. ]

The firm, A La Mobile, has deployed a Google browser, phone dialer, audio player, calendar, and contacts manager onto a Qtek 9090 smartphone from HTC, which is part of the Google-launched Open Handset Coalition. Boasting more than 30 partners, Open Handset hopes to shake up the mobile market by simplifying mobile app development via Android's open development platform.

A La Mobile's suite includes such ancillary phone favorites as camera software and games, and offers calculator and note-taking functionality. The prototype suite will be pitched to handset makers, A La Mobile CEO Pauline Lo Alker told USA Today.

A La Mobile is one of many teams presumably working to develop for Android. After all, Google, which released its SDK for Android in November, is offering $10 million to developers of "innovative and compelling" Android-based apps.

But luring developers to establish suites using the Java-based SDK is one thing. Winning over the mobile industry is another. Many question the platform's ability to make a lasting impact. Chief among them, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who described Android as a mere "press release" in November.

Yet, assuming the suite performs, the A La Mobile announcement could be significant, if only because it lends something concrete to Google's dream.

"Android has the ambitious mission of creating a total mobile device software platform, from the chip level to the user GUI, based on Linux 2.6 and implementing a custom Java virtual machine, a WebKit-based browser, SQL database, and full application access to device hardware," InfoWorld's Tom Yager writes in his in-depth analysis at the Android SDK. "It's every mobile developer's dream, but right now, Android is a set of Java classes, some rough-hewn tools, and a device emulator, the last of these giving Android a shot at pull from end users."