Mobile context demands mobile presentation
One of the great benefits of the iPhone release is that it means more people are trying out the mobile web rather than just talking about it. With that comes awareness of the challenges of making content work in the mobile context.
It's easy to assume that what you need on your mobile device is the same as on your desktop. Vidya Lakshmipathy from Forrester recently said that the web on an iPhone wins over mobile web. We beg to differ. For the same reason that reading a broadsheet news paper on an airplane is not a great experience, a good mobile web experience is not about trying to reproduce what's on your PC.
Different context requires different presentation. As Dave Winer says in response:
I would love to agree, but I came to the opposite conclusion. [...]
The iPhone view of the web is not optimal for the user. Given a choice between a site well-designed for mobile use, and the extra work you have to do to zoom in and out and scroll in all directions to read a page laid out for a big screen on a tiny one, there's no choice at all, I'll go with the one designed for mobile use.
That's one good reason why made-for-mobile content works best on mobile. Another one is the time taken to download desktop pages on mobile devices, and associated data costs (unless you're lucky enough to have a flat data plan).
In mobile, context is everything.
amen... and as an iphone owner i agree.
Posted by: Matthew Nelson | 02 August 2007 at 06:15 PM
its just going to take time for people to realise that .mobi is the way to go, at the moment we are still waiting for numbers of mobile internet users to build to a level where .mobi is really needed.
Posted by: cricket fan | 03 August 2007 at 11:29 AM
I have been looking to see if the mobile device manufacturers supporting .mobi will come out with a single ".mobi" key or shortcut - do you know if this is planned or being discussed?
Posted by: Wesley Kenzie | 03 August 2007 at 05:50 PM
@Wesley: we thing that this will happen gradually as the content comes online. The more good mobile content that shows up in the .mobi domain, the more the browser makers will be encouraged to add shortcuts like this.
Posted by: Ronan Cremin | 08 August 2007 at 04:35 PM
Whether one agrees to that having a mobile specific domain is good thing or not the mobile browser manufacturers should build their products following standards like XHTML and CSS. This way web developers would have a common ground to work on and they would have a chance to decide if their users need a mobile presentation of their site or not.
One easy way to do this is to build a different CSS stylesheets for desktop and mobile devices. Unfortunately every mobile browser does not support this i.e the Nokia S60 and iPhone browsers.
Fortunately Nokia has given us the opportunity to suggest features to their future development of the S60 platform. Make your opinions heard:
http://www.s60.com/business/productinfo/wishlist/displayWishList.do
Posted by: Bircha | 17 August 2007 at 11:03 AM