Until mobile phones become a lot faster and carry more storage and bandwidth becomes a lot cheaper and more ubiquitous, I believe the most successful approaches

Until mobile phones become a lot faster and carry more storage and bandwidth becomes a lot cheaper and more ubiquitous, I believe the most successful approaches simply adapts the underlying framework for use with other languages (and abstraction levels), while simultaneously minimizing the excess baggage/payload required to get a small application up and running. Clojure for Android for instance suffers from this problem (1.7 MB payload), while Scala, Mirah (Ruby-like) and Kawa (Lisp/Scheme) seems to do a decent job on providing thinner wrappers on the host platform. I see the same thing on the web as well, with a multitude of languages targeting javascript as the platform. I did a small writeup on "Android development without Java" on http://kjeldahl.net/d7/node/32 http://kjeldahl.net/d7/node/32 if you want more details than I wrote here.