In meetings here at CTIA, one well-known carrier application vendor expressed frustration that many of the apps it has been pushing its customers to deploy for years -- converged messaging, conversational SMS, visual voice mail, single-number follow-me calling services and more -- are now being deployed with such fanfare by telco competitors like Apple and Google.

“Every one of these services, we’ve been showing them for years, urging our customers to get out in front and invest in them,” said the vendor, name withheld to protect them from the following quote, wherein our contact described those customers as a “happy cartel of mediocrity.”

Indeed, in a theme heard again and again, upstarts like Apple were given credit not so much for breaking new ground, but for doing it so elegantly and so urgently. When it comes to software -- OS and apps -- mobile players haven’t been willing to raise the bar.

“People in the handset business have been too willing to think that customers want a phone that looks like a phone. There’s lots of room for delivering more individual experiences,” Johan Sandberg, CEO of Symbian-based UI/OS vendor UIQ Technology, told me in an interview. “What the iPhone has done is to bring us the attention we need to move the user experience where we need it to be.”

Indeed, the good news is that when it comes mobile applications and mobile development, we’re just at the beginning of the revolution, not at its close.

That means that traditional mobile service operators, handset manufacturers and application developers -- equipped with the appropriate levels of urgency and able to conjure just the right amounts of design elegance -- still have time to get in the game.

The even better news is that the elements that make up the core of the mobile application ecosystem -- SMS, increasingly mobile-driven email and a wide array of emerging personal/presence-driven services -- represent as large a market for innovation as that other “innovation platform,” the World Wide Web.

Text-messaging alone grew 157 percent versus last year, according to CTIA research, reaching 1.6 billion messages delivered per day. Forget the Web -- there’s a massive application opportunity helping people enhance and better managing that key messaging application, not to mention better integrate it with email and voice mail and do so across a range of devices. What would “SMS 2.0” look like? Who knows, but it’s clearly an area ripe for innovation.

The new era of open networks, open devices and open apps will be a challenging environment to play in, no doubt. The carrier deck, in particular, faces pressure. But operators shouldn’t hold onto it like a lifeline.

“For a lot of users, it’s nice to have a portal. It’s a trusted experience where they know what they are getting,” said Edward Schmit, who’s in charge of AT&T Mobility’s devCentral program. “It’s up to us incumbents to make it better. If we’re not doing the job, it’s appropriate for users to go off-deck.”

And the path to more open apps will be anything but neat.

“What we all really want is a blurring on-deck and off-deck from a customer point of view and let someone else worry about the value chain issues,” said Mitch Oliver, vp of solutions and marketing for Qualcomm’s Internet Services’ unit, which has been working to help content providers reach customers directly, bypassing the carrier deck.

But for aggressive mobile operators and app developers, complexity means opportunity.

“We’ve always embraced the complexity of this business,” said Travis Boatman, vice president-worldwide studios for mobile game-maker Electronics Arts Mobile. “More complexity means more choice. That’s where the customers are.”

E-mail me at rkarpinski@telephonyonline.com