“Smartphones have historically been oriented towards business users. The iPhone is more of an entertainment platform”, notes John Jersin, CEO of mobile startup zintin. “Its not that there won’t be serious business applications on the iPhone, but the apps will have exposure to a different audience, and developers are very aware of that fact”, he says.

The brainchild of three Stanford computer science graduates, Silicon Valley-based zintin, like hundreds of other new startups, is exploring the new Internet frontier: Mobile. Described as a mix of social networking, media sharing and location awareness, zintin will debut first on the iPhone later this summer, while at the same time the company has already began porting the application to Android, Google’s open-source mobile operating system.

In an email exchange with last100, Jersin talked about the opportunities for developers that both iPhone and Android represent, how the two platforms differ in their approach to openness, and what the mobile landscape may look like in 12-18 months time.

Excerpts from our Q&A edited for space and clarity, follow after the jump…