Emerging Trends in the Mobile Web
March 27, 2008 by Sachendra Yadav
In 2001, the phone could connect to the web via WAP. Limited content, reach, connectivity and speed issues marred the WAPscape. By 2008, Mobile Web use is growing faster than ever, as noted in this post by ReadWriteWeb, Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. 3G Mobile Broadband use also increased during 2007 with the average monthly data transfer rate up 25% over the course of the year, indicating that usage seems to rise with experience.
Desktop Class Browsers
With emergence of desktop class browsers(Skyfire, Opera Mobile 9.5, MiniMo) for mobiles, users can get a near PC browsing experience on their phones, this however, will be limited to high-end devices for now due to the high memory, processing power and bigger screen requirements.
OneWeb
W3C is working on OneWeb, it hopes that this new tool will help developers build websites that will work well on any device, be it a phone or a video-game console.
Mobile Widgets
Thanks to the availability of AJAX, Web platforms and web runtimes, service providers can provide easy to access and easy to use services. Browsing is out, engaging experiences are in, operators and OEMs are deploying mobile portals to make access to services easily available. All major players in the web space (and a plethora of small ones) are creating mobile widgets with customized content and services to reach out the users without them having to open a browser and link to the entire site.
m-portals and mobile widgets have the following benefits over the browser:
- Faster access
- Reduced clicks
- Integration with native phone Apps (Camera, Media Gallery etc)
- Rich and more engaging user experience
- Low latency
- Lower bandwidth requirement
Creators of mobile widgets need to use caution in what content/feature/service they offer because the mobile paradigm is very different from the desktop, as Paul Golding puts it “The bulk of web-based apps have been human-to-content (H2C). However, in the mobile world, the dominant paradigm is distinctly real-time voice and messaging, supporting a predominantly human-to-human (H2H) mode of interaction.”
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i like the new term H2H, are we coming back to the basics
?
Mobile web widgets are far more practical for users than browsing… although new generation devices make traditional browsing a lot more enjoyable & usable
What are your thoughts on dotmobi standards as a way of making content findable and viewable across all devices?
Phil,
I just saw a 90 euro Nokia phone with opera mini (desktop class browser). The price of this phone will drop to 50 euros in a few months. As the penetration of these devices increase the need to customize content for mobile would go away and we’ll need to create regular websites that degrade nicely on a mobile web browser which may not support say flash or embedded media.