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Will the Mobile Web happen and if so what will it look like? Three recent articles address this question and come to different conclusions. That is because they look at the question from different viewpoints. There is always a dichotomy. You can examine a situation from the manufacturer viewpoint - what might be called the product-driven approach. Or you can look at it from the consumer’s point of view - the customer-centric approach.

Richard MacManus in a post, iPhone vs Mobile Web, examines a Forrester report (summary) that might be said to embody the product driven approach. Their conclusion is that the iPhone signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today. Presumably iPhone-like devices will dominate the mobile space.

Christian Montoya finds that a very gloomy view of the mobile web. He feels that it would be ludicrous to think that any company would be capable of designing a separate portal to their website for each and every device. He pins his faith on the good folks at the W3C, who have had the foresight to offer device-profiles for CSS, so that any developer can write one CSS file that caters their site to all hand-held devices. Whether this will deliver satisfactory user experiences is open to question.

In my opinion both of these views do not adequately include the consumer’s point of view. The vast majority of consumers will be using cell phones. This imposes obvious constraints on screen real estate and battery capacity. The third article accepts these realities in discussing solutions. WAP Review suggests that Transcoders and the iPhone do not make the Mobile Web obsolete. As they point out:

Purpose built mobile sites can work around the limitations to give the best possible experience. As mobile browsers get more powerful new types of exclusively mobile web services will become possible. Already we have streaming media on mobiles and soon it should be possible to share your GPS or cell location with mobile services to provide location aware information without having to type in an address. Integration with near field communication for mobile payments is another technology that is surely coming to the mobile web.

Their solution is that for most sites you will still need two versions:

• A full-web version that is designed to degrade gracefully for maximum usability on the iPhone and other full web mobile browsers, and
• A mobile specific version with no JavaScript that is under 10 KB of mark-up and 20 KB total page weight including images and style sheets for the limited browsers still prevalent on cell phones.

To me that sounds like a Mobile Web that will deliver the satisfactory experiences that consumers are looking for.

Related:
Design For Mobile Device Diversity
The Multi-Web Practice

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Related Posts

• November 19, 2008 -- Voices mumble, fingers fumble
• November 16, 2008 -- Botch Your Buzz (ByB)
• September 23, 2008 -- G1, Gphone, Tphone - what will you call your Google phone?
• November 1, 2007 -- A ?phone for Christmas
• July 26, 2007 -- Apple versus PC - Now For The Real Mobile Web

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Cell phones, Mobile, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.