Mobile Phones, the good, the bad and the ugly

Mobile device limitations

John Kemp - 18 June 2009

• Small screen
• Poor keyboard technology
• Battery consumption is shunned
• Not easily externally addressable
• Browser URI length limitations (in some devices)
• Lack of Javascript and cookies (in some devices)

Mobile device benefits

• Potentially immersive environment (e.g. haptic interfaces)
• Ability to provide interesting social information (e.g. location, contacts)

Privacy considerations

• Mobile phone number (IP address, Bluetooth address, MAC address) is an identifier for a small group of (typically one!) people
• Data available from mobile phone tends to be quite personal
• Sensors can also give sensitive information (my location)

Mobile networks

• Often have tunnelling/transcoding proxies
• Latency and bandwidth limitations
• Cost

History

• WAP/WML -> XHTML
• .mobi and transcoding proxies (Opera Mini, Mowser)
• Some mobile browser standardization through WebKit, HTML5 and WebApps Widgets
• Device Javascript APIs, mobile web servers
• Other personal computing devices now have many of the same issues as mobiles

Some related Work

• [ARIA] W3C WAI-ARIA - http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/
• [MTG] W3C Device Independent Testing Guidelines - http://www.w3.org/TR/di-testing/
• [UWA] W3C Universal Web Applications WG - http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/
• [MWBP] W3C Mobile Web Best Practices - http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/
• [EXI] W3C Efficient XML - http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/
• [DOTMOBI] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mobi
• [MSITE] Nokia Mobile Web Server Project - http://mymobilesite.net/
• [Unite] http://unite.opera.com/
• [MINI] http://www.opera.com/mini/
• [RHTTP] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lentczner-rhttp-00

Related TAG issues

• [binaryXML-30] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/30
• [webApplicationState-60] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/60