Planet Mobile Web

loved it!

Marek Pawlowski, who created the Mobile User Experience conference asked me my views on : What future for the mobile phone in a multi-platform world? (which is also the theme of the MEX conference this year)

Here are my views:

There was once a notion of the mobile device as a remote control to our life.

Initially, that notion was fanciful .. but today it may be closer than we think ..

As mobile networks become more open - they will embrace the opportunities from non phone devices.

Thus, the phone (if we may call it that) will embrace functionality from other devices. This is already happening.

But more importantly, the idea of a 'connection' will be decoupled from the person. People already have more than one phones in many cases .. but devices will also be network enabled. This makes a big difference.

So, what technologies/initiatives are making this possible in the near future(three to five years)?

If we get that right - then we can indeed predict the role of the mobile device in the multiplatform world

Here are my bets

a) The Cloud - which unifies the Web, Mobile and social network domains

b) The Internet of things enabled through the Cloud / mobile device: The phone becomes a magic wand to the cloud services: Mobile sensor based interface to the cloud to jump start the Internet of things ..

c) DLNA

d) Smart Grids which provide a 'use case' for ubiquitous computing. I am doing some research in this space if you are interested

e) LTE - Why LTE is needed next year

f) Femtocells and homegateways

Some notes .. I believe that TV(as it is currently) will NOT adapt fast enough .. see I don't need two government funded TV channels - I need a wikipedia button on my Sky remote .. and these developments will be good for the Operator as their network gets deployed into more areas It will also be good for device makers ..

The word 'mobile phone' will have no meaning and will be used only as a fallback from the old days - just the the word 'computer' is used today i.e. at one time the primary function of the computer was to 'compute' today .. we take that function for granted ..

Comments welcome!

Our friend Helen Keegan is creating an interesting event called Heroes of the Mobile Screen in London. It's unique feature is that it also brings (alongwith the rest of the industry) secondary school pupils, college students and other members of the same generation together in one room. With speakers like JP Rangaswami, Daniel Appelquist, Doug Richards, Peggy Ann Salz and others, this should be an interesting event. You can see more at Heroes of the Mobile Screen

Shitrag migration (10 minutes)

Morning breaks. Nothing on the mat.

"Fucking lazy fucking bastard paperboy, sacked off for the morning, no bloody respect" he grumbles, voice falling unsteadily from outrage to nothing as a month-old stain of ketchup catches his attention
and derails his train of thought.

3 hours pass. Not even a bill, not even a flyer advertising window cleaners or new local sellers of pizza.

"Fucking bastard postie, fucking striking bollocks", he opines, to no-one in particular, and no-one nods quietly in agreement.

Bereft of any contact with the outside world but not really missing it all that much, he shuffles around the filthy flat. He can't find the takeaway menu - where'd she put it this time? So he cobbles together a filthy lunch, and for dessert repairs upstairs to enjoy a characteristically unpleasant 3pm bowel motion - relief followed by the crushing disappointment and then shame that only a hollow cardboard tube can bring.

As the sun crawls down the horizon and he settles down filthed in front of countdown, creases stretch out and thin triangular wings start to flex. Briefly darkening the view through the back window, the origami flock rises as one and heads 180 degrees off magnetic north for the long flight home.

Reluctant Ringmaster (5 minutes)

"Roll up, roll up, see the artist! Marvel at his brushmanship! Wonder at his innovative use of oils! Quake at the implied satire of his imagery!"

The top hat is unnecessarily OTT and slightly patronising. Plus it's dark and it's wet and it's late and I want to go inside and curl up with a ham sandwich, a jammy dodger, and Radio 1, but he says I'm not allowed to until it's done.

I bash out an especially unpleasant caricature of a rotund women who's brought her two children to see me. She shrieks, her eyes well up and they slope off, leaving 6 neat puddles of tears.

I get the night off.

Statue Pipe (2 minutes)

I been here 200 years, protected by Arts Council funding and a large umbrella-like structure which keeps the worst of the rain off and offers protection to the crowd which inevitably gathers beneath my chin in
a storm. Penniless artists touch me up on occasion, keeping me fresh.

And then there's the museum next door, new plumbing, grade 1 listed over my grade 2, and I'm half-blinded by the new drain running through my left eye.

The N97 is Nokia's flagship model, at least until the N900 comes out. It didn't get very good reviews initially but with last week's release of new v 2.0 firmware I'm seeing a lot of positive reports about the handset. The N97 seems to be selling like hotcakes too, moving two million units in the first three months to become Nokia's best selling Symbian device.

Some of those two million have likely been to N97 Fanatics to read the best break down I've seen of what exactly is in firmware 2.0 as well as a comprehensive hands-on 2.0 review.

N97 Fanatics is Mike Macias' newest site. Mike ran Nokia's S60 Ambassador program, until it was recently shut down, and has a couple of other model specific sites; E71fanatics.com and theN82blog.com. N97 Fanatics looks to be a great place for N97 users and prospective buyers to hang out and read the extensive coverage of the phone as well as apps, games and themes for it. There are also inks to the best current deals on the phone and an active N97 users forum on the site.

The mobile edition of N97 Fanatics uses Crowd Favorite's. WordPress Mobile Edition plugin to generate mobile formatted versions of all the site's pages except the forums. There is at least a link on the mobile site to the desktop version of the forums, which load quickly and are actually quite usable in either the Nokia browser or Opera Mini.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology/Mobile/Smartphones/Symbian

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 5 "Good"

Mobile Link: n97fanatics.com

Hello
I am trying to get some information about books on iPhone. I would be interested to speak to you if you use book readers like Stanza on the iPhone and / or if you read any books on the iPhone or mobile devices. If so, please email me at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com

I’ve been working over the past few weeks on a nifty little tool that summarizes a number of W3C technologies, including the Mobile Web Best Practices, in a mobile-friendly format, called the W3C Cheatsheet.

See my post in the W3C blog to learn more about it, and send your feedback!

Yesterday, Mobify released Version 2 of their cloud based visual tool for creating mobile views of existing Web sites.

Mobify is aimed squarely at Web designers. Using it, a designer "Mobifies" an existing desktop site by selecting elements using a a browser based, visual interface. The selected dynamic elements are then laid out on a mobile canvas where headers, footers and static HTML blocks can be added and the  CSS styling  can be tweaked.

Finished "Mobile Views", as Mobify calls them, are hosted on Mobify's servers. Plugins for WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal and Django or a JavaScript snippet can be used to automatically redirect mobile users to your site's mobile view. You can even set things up so that your mobile view appears as a subdomain of your desktop URL link like m.mysite.com.

Mobify does browser detection and optimizes layout and image sizes for optimal appearance on over 5000 different mobile devices

Possibly the best part of Mobify is the pricing. Mobify compares very favorably in features with enterprise grade mobile design tools but is affordable to all publishers with pricing options ranging from free to $99.99 per month. Even the free plan includes full use of all the design tools, hosting, the CMS plugins and the ability to use your own domain. The $24.99 "Plus" plan removes the Mobify logo from the footer and enables the use of AdMob or Google analytics. The $99.99 per month Professional package lets you run ads on your mobile view, enables SSL and includes phone and email support. Enterprise and SLA packages are also available for high traffic sites.

Version 2 of Mobify adds the following features:

• Google Analytics support.
• Faster mobifying of WordPress, Drupal and ExpressionEngine websites.
• Better Support for IE 7 & 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome in the Designer
• Revision Control System.
• A streamlined site management screen.
• Embed code to demo your mobile view on your desktop site.

Disclaimer: I've been following Mobify since the beginning and know the founder, Igor Faletski and the rest of the team at Mobify. I also did some consulting for Mobify early on. I am undoubtedly biased, but I do believe that Mobify is the best and most cost effective tool of its kind.

It seems I'm in good company with that assessment. The list of Mobify users reads like a Who's Who of the Web design world, including Jeffrey Zeldman (A List Apart), Jacob Gube (Six Revisions),  Jacob Cass (Just Creative Design), Antonio Lupetti (woork), Jonathan Snook, Chris Conyier (CSS-Tricks) and many more. Mobify is also  used by a number of  high traffic sites like SitePoint; SPIN, VIBE and Discover magazines; Cricket.com's Fantasy Cricket; Webdesigner Depot and MetroLyrics.

If you have a Web site and you don't have a mobile presence or you aren't satisfied with your current one, take a look at Mobify, the easiest way to create a high quality mobile version of an existing site.

If you haven’t, go check out part 1 of this series, in which I argue about the increasing role of feature phones in mobile web, and possibly apps.

I think a major shift in how we pay for mobile data is coming, within a year or two. And content companies need to figure out how to conserve bits. They aren’t free.

The role of data plans

Let’s take a look at unlimited data plans for a moment. Unlimited data plans are great! They provide enormous freedom! No worrying about how much data you use! Terrific!

And it is terrific. It’s great for people who can afford to spend $70 per month for each phone in their family. That’s not terrific for everybody. And it leaves people like my father, who want smart phones and that freedom but aren’t planning on watching video or tethering, paying for heavy users.

Variable pricing is inevitable

Unlimited data plans not only reduce access to a larger number of people, they also cause congestion problems. There is no cost to using the network, and there is cost to not using the network. It’s annoying on many devices to switch to wi-fi; it’s inconvenient to change your email or web habits.

As the operators increase available bandwidth, demands will go up. Video streaming, data cards, and tethering become more popular. People enter the world of mobile data from no experience to 3G cards, possibly with the intent to replace their home connection.

As the experience degrades (think AT&T access in places like New York and San Francisco), the operators’ brands take a major hit. Vehicle traffic planners have known this for years: roads fill to capacity. The existence of the larger roads change drivers’ behavior, even to purchasing houses further from town.

Some sort of change in pricing model is inevitable. Mark Lowenstein over at FierceWireless provides a few options. You can read a deeper discussion on the problem, and the solution, over at Slate.com.

And yes, Verizon already has a tiered data plan.

Global concern

I’ve just set out the argument for why the U.S. will not have universal unlimited data. That was the tough part of the argument; the economics for unlimited data are better here than in many places. In much of the world, pre-paid plans with pay-per-kilobyte are the norm. And this includes hundreds of millions of users (over 300 million in India alone) who do not have computer access to the Internet.

Increasing role of smart phones

As we discussed last time, feature phones are becoming more capable. Further, they have cheaper data connections than do smart phones, because on average they are used less. (There’s that tiered pricing again).

On top of this, smart phones are being pushed deeper and deeper into the feature phone market. Nokia has done this for years, and customers do not even realize they own a smart phone. Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices are being used as feature phones. Android phones “for the masses” are being deployed.

As smart phones get pushed deeper into the market, they will be selected by prepaid users more and more. Many of these users will still be paying per kilobyte.

Design implications

Right now, the bulk of the mobile web industry is moving to rich web interactions. But at what cost?

In a world of pay-per-kilobyte, is that 12kb JQTouch framework worth it? Sometimes, yes. But frequently, no.

It’s what we’ve been preaching all along: keep the page size down. Okay, we’re no longer limiting you to 1300 bytes (the standard was 1492 but there was this one Sanyo device …), but let’s do our best to keep sizes down.

If you design for speed, you’ll get a long way towards designing for different types of connection.

I’m hoping that HTML5 will be able to help us out. Imagine a local cache of the entire JQuery and JQTouch libraries available for any page to use without re-downloading. Perhaps a JQuery browser plug-in?

Similarly, the content industry should be pressuring mobile operators to publish not just the type of device, but the speed and cost of connection. If we had this information, we could really optimize content and the whole experience for the current situation. If the connection is free or cheap, and the current speed is fast, we send down the enriched experience. If the connection is dear, or the congestion is bad, then send down the lightweight experience.

Little Springs Design is a user experience design consultancy focused exclusively on mobile. For information on contracting our design, strategy, training, and testing services, please contact us today.
See our scheduled training on mobile design, including convenient webinars


Copyright ©2009 Little Springs Design, Inc.

Every year, I support the The Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal - so I thought I should blog about it this year. You can donate through this link

The review period for the two Last Call working drafts published by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group last month ends tomorrow. This is a reminder that the public community is invited to review and comment the drafts:

• The Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies provides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. This version is the result of returning the document to Last Call based on public feedback received during the first review period.
• The Mobile Web Application Best Practices specifies Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices.

Comments should be sent to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (with public archives). Thanks in advance!

HowStuffWorks.com is a great site featuring thousands of articles that uses  non-technical language, charts, diagrams and videos how all sorts of complex products, technologies and processes work. Typical articles have titles like "How X works" where "X" can be anything from "OLEDs" to "identity theft".

I recently discovered that How Stuff Works has a mobile site and immediately headed there to check it out. I have to say I was a little disappointed. There's nothing wrong with the site's design,it's easy to navigate and uses browser detection to optimize markup, images and page size to deliver a good experience on everything from old wml-only phones to the iPhone. Although I wish site's designer's had applied a style="max-width:100%; height:auto;" attribute to that logo image to force Opera Mini to re-size it to fit.

The problem with the mobile site is the content. Has far as I could see there is nothing there but a few quiz's and a bunch of "Top 5 This " and "10 Best That" lists like "10 Best Places for Outdoorsy Types to Live' or "5 Myths about Steve Jobs". How Stuff Works' stock in trade, the "How X Works" pieces, seem to be totally missing. I used mobile site's search engine to look for OLED and "identity theft" and came up with nothing. I'll admit I enjoyed reading some of the "Top 10..." pieces but what ever happened to "How Stuff Works" on m.howstuffworks.com?

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 4 "Good"

Mobile Link: m.howstuffworks.com

It's been a long wait but Opera Software today released the first Beta of Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian.  Supporting Symbian S30 3rd and 5th edition devices, Opera Mobile 10 is available  free of charge at opera.com/mobile/next/.

I've downloaded the new Beta onto my trusty Nokia N95-3, which is  the North America Market version of the original N95, and I am impressed. The first thing I did was run the Acid 3 Test where Opera Mobile scored 100 out of 100 points. On all the real world sites I tried rendering was beautiful and images looked amazingly. Compatibility with difficult sites seems high too. I was able to load the iPhone/Android versions of both iGoogle and Google Reader using Opera Mobile 10. Both displayed and worked perfectly.  That's a good thing as neither of these sites works properly in  Opera Mini. The Symbian Webkit based browser also has problems with the iPhone iGoogle, although does great with Reader.

One thing that bothered me was that I'm starting to see reports by users on Twitter complaining of out of memory errors running Opera Mobile 10. And then GoMo News published a piece provocatively titled "Memory problem dogs new Opera Mobile" which reports that even with nothing else running, Opera Mobile  10 on an N95 was unable to open the GoMo News home page or the BBC front page without getting an error.

My own experiences with Opera Mobile 10 on an  N95 where completely different.  Not only was I able to load both the 2.5 MB (why so big?) GoMo News and the 465 KB BBC homepages without error,  I could even load them both at once in separate tabs.  And then I loaded Wikipedia's gigantic 1.5 MB "USA" article in a third tab, still with no errors. With all three large pages loaded, the browser didn't even slow  down and was completely usable! Why such completely different results from two  N95s?

I'm pretty sure the difference is that GoMo News is using the original European N95 which shipped with 64 of RAM, of which about 20 MB are free at start up.  My US model N95 has much more RAM, 120 MB total, with 93 MB available to the user at start up.  That's over four times the available RAM compared with the European model.

To confirm my suspicions I run a little test to see how much memory Opera Mobile uses and how that usage compares with the N95's built-in Webkit based browser and Opera Mini 5.  The methodology was to power cycle the phone, load one of the browsers, clear the browser cache and check free RAM, then load each page into a separate tab, keeping all the tabs open and checking RAM after each page loaded. Results are summarized below. The first number in each cell is the free RAM in MB's after loading each page, the second is a running total of how much total RAM each browser is using.  To check RAM usage, I used Phonetinfo, a lightweight free utility that tells you everything about your S60 3rd or 5th edition phone.

* The Nokia Browser was unable to display the BBC homepage, only showing the top header.

It's pretty obvious why GoMoNews can't load their own homepage in Opera Mobile. 37 MBs are required with only 20 available.  It looks like the built in browser would have run out of memory on that page too.  I think the GoMo piece should really have been titled "Memory problem dogs old Nokia N95-1" which is not exactly news.  The bottom line is that the new generation of advanced mobile browsers require lots of memory, particularly when loading 2.5 MB desktop pages.  If your Symbian phone doesn't have at least 40 MB of free RAM at startup, you will likely get memory errors running the Opera Mobile 10 Beta.  3-Lib has a table showing the free RAM for virtually every Symbian phone.  Lots of early S60 3rd edition phones like the N95-1, E65 and N77 are pretty bad with 20 MB or less. Fortunately most recent Symbian phones do have enough RAM for Opera Mobile, though some like the N97 with only 46 MB free, barely do.  If your phone doesn't have enough memory to run Opera Mobile, may I recomend Opera Mini 5. It has the same user interface and nearly as good rendering as Opera Mobile and it loads pages even faster and uses hardly any RAM.

One of the best headlines I have seen in the guardian ...

So essentially, they are saying that they aren't going to stop you from using non-Orange streaming applications, but if you overstep their limits then it's a way that they can enforce the terms of your contract.

Read more at ..

Want to use your Orange iPhone? There's a cap for that