Mobile Portability - How the Internet will be Integrated on the Mobile Phone?
By Lars Hartkopf, Head of Marketing, Netbiscuits
Everybody is talking about the "Mobile Internet." While market data widely supports the growing strength of the medium, there are questions as to how developers will make the leap from PC to mobile devices. Here's some guidance:
Mobile Portability I: From PC to Mobile Phone
The iPhone question: Why a mobile website at all?
The iPhone is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it has provided almost unimagined momentum for mobile web surfing. However, the iPhone has also given some decision makers and developers a sense of false confidence. They believe that an "iPhone standard" will be implemented all over the country in two or three years, so that PC websites will simply be easily usable over the mobile phone.
This thinking is a mistake. The Internet, as we now know it, has been optimized for use on a PC. It was created specifically for PC use cases. Mobile phones are different. Form factors, operability and not least the patterns of use fundamentally differ from that of the PC. The general rule is: PC Web is stationary and global, Mobile Web is mobile and local. The iPhone is a type of stopgap, made for an internet that, in most cases, does not currently support "mobile websites."
Client or website: The correct entry into Mobile Web
There are two paths leading to Mobile Web: mobile clients and mobile websites. The decision as to which way is the better way, can only be made for each individual case. The main advantages of client based Mobile Web applications are that they provide very good possibilities for graphic design of user interfaces and keep contents available even offline. Furthermore they often show faster reaction times and are easier to link to other telephone functions such as directories, camera etc. The main disadvantage of every client-based solution is that they initially need to be downloaded from the user and installed on the mobile - a practice that will need to be repeated for every new release. Many users are prevented from taking this deciding step due to technical problems, security issues and a lack of clarity concerning costs involved. Furthermore clients are always dependent on the mobile phone operating system and must often undergo costly adjustments for each individual terminal.
Mobile websites do not require any installation. They are immediately available over the browser and the sites content and software are continuously updated, unobtrusively to the mobile user. Mobile websites also provide a greater scope of outreach than clients as nowadays practically all mobile phones have a browser. Adjusting mobile websites and rich media content to various mobile terminals can be made 100% automatic, which means a massive reduction in development and testing expenses. User interface design is also no longer an obstacle: Modern mobile phone browsers enable use of AJAX and Flash, thus enabling a user experience, similar to that of PC Web.
Mobile Portability II: From mobile phone to mobile phone
Chaos in Mobile Web
Everything is very simple for PC Web. There are widely accepted standards for hardware and mark-up languages, there are two or three operating systems and three or four relevant browsers. Mobile Web is a totally different story: Everything is chaotic.
• A standard has not yet been established for mobile mark-up languages. Various terminals and browsers require different mark-ups such as e.g. HTML, XHTML or WML. Sometimes even network internal mark-up languages are required, such as Vodafone PartnerML.
• There is also absolutely no standardization for mobile rich media content. Again various terminals support very different audio, video and picture formats. For example, a video that is available for all video compatible mobile phones must be transcoded and kept in many different variations to adapt for the variance in phones available on the market.
• There are also no standards concerning hardware parameters such as display format. The diversity of these form factors mean it is necessary to adjust mobile websites individually for every terminal and "on the fly".
The challenges that result from this situation are vast. First, a lot of experience is needed to develop mobile websites that simultaneously support several mark-up languages. Then an infrastructure is needed to transcode rich media content to all mobile formats. Last but not least, in order to enable an individual adjustment, it must be known which mark-up language, media formats and hardware parameters are on each mobile phone.
Previously this task appeared to be almost impossible to solve. Therefore mobile websites were only developed for certain terminal categories or the smallest common denominator was chosen. This meant that the features of modern mobile phone browsers were not being used to their full potential.
Mobile Portability Middleware: Write Once, Run Anywhere!
Chaos in Mobile Web will hardly ebb in the future. Too many players are influencing the market. More and more players continue to join the market such as Google or Yahoo. Consequently, almost all mark-up languages need to be covered, all media formats need to be present, and all relevant parameters of all mobile phones across the world need to be considered in order to ensure as close to 100% coverage as possible for mobile websites.
Mobile Portability III: Which content go mobile?
State-of-the-art middleware technologies mean that technical challenges in the Mobile Web finally take a back seat. Therefore the question becomes much more important as to which content could be successful on the mobile phone. Opinions vary.
It is surely not a mistake to initially put content on the mobile phone which has also been successful on the PC Web. Intelligent adjustment to the medium is a deciding factor for the success. That means: Focus on the mobile use case and keep to the essentials. Example eBay: Product search and bidding mechanism were mobilised, registration continues only to be possible online.
However don't just think cross-media and uni-directional, from PC Web to mobile. See the mobile phone as a completely new independent medium. Convince yourself that there are twice as many mobile phone users than Internet users world-wide. 50% of your potential customers do not have access to a computer and do not know PC Web. That surely is not the case in Europe and the USA. However if you are addressing the global market, you would exclude half of your potential customers with cross-media services.
