Geesh — one company dies and industry pundits (here
for example) are declaring that the mobile web is finally dead.
What? Although my phone finally supports 3G in those areas of the
country that have 3G service — I’d hardly say that my Windows Mobile 6
phone web browsing experience is anything but barely adequate. I was never bothered
by AT&T EDGE speeds — mainly because the web pages rendered so poorly as
to be barely useable. I don’t fault web sites for not considering my use to be
a prime candidate for optimization and development. It’s a lot of work just to
make a web page work on the various full-sized browsers such as IE, Firefox, and
Safari. Then, they must consider the actual frequency of mobile users — near
0.1% I’m sure before deciding to create an optimized mobile web version.
Amazon has a mobile site though
— and it’s perfect for my needs. Fast, simple, and renders perfectly.
The other day in a local store, I did some price comparison’s with Amazon to
verify that I should buy some of the stuff locally and wait to buy a few items when
I got home from Amazon (I didn’t feel the need to try to buy something from
Amazon while in a physical store).
I frequently use mobile versions of news (CNN, MSNBC), weather (weather.com), and
Google Reader.
Why do we still need mobile then?
I hear people talking about the ideal experience that is available on the
iPhone/iPod touch for browsing the web. I’m using a beta of SkyFire which
attempts to emulate some of the experience of the iPhone browser on my WM6 phone.
It’s not bad — but what I really don’t care for is all the zooming
in and out and panning. It’s slow and sloppy. I’m disappointed when I
need to use it. It’s solving a problem that we ideally shouldn’t have to
deal with.
I’d be skeptical that you’d ever find a piece of PC/Mac software that
emulated that zooming and panning experience on your monitor/LCD and enjoy it
(imagine if your current web browser worked that way). (And no, mapping software doesn’t count!) Instead, you’d want something optimized for the computer and display. Lots
of the better web designers and web sites get this and create optimized web sites
for phones (I’ve seen mention of quite a few for the iPhone for example). I
for one, hope they continue and don’t declare mobile web to be dead. For most
applications, it’s a reasonable experience that is zero-install and "good
enough." It also targets the most phones — whereas doing custom
development for the various phone platforms takes time, effort, etc.
Do you have a data plan? Do you use your mobile phone’s web browser? What are
your thoughts?
