momochicago

There has been a lot of talk about mobile web 2.0 lately and my initial impressions were that this was just another term coined by conference organizers.

????????Attending overtheair last weekend changed my view of this. The mobile web is real and what makes it exciting this time around is the inclusion of the millions of web developers into the mobile fold. The number of mobile websites (not .mobi) that were launched last year since the arrival of the iphone has been tremendous, these are sites catering specifically to the mobile audience and serving a mobile audience only.

The pulse of the conference was certainly around web technologies and their utilization in the mobile space. There was a lot of talk around browser compatibility and web standards which was unheard of in previous mobile conferences, we used to bore ourselves to death talking about operator walled gardens and the tyranny they impose on mobile content developers.

I feel we are at a fork in the road here and the manufacturers and the OS providers need to make a choice:

a. continue to meet demand for browsers on mobile devices with the traditional browser model in mind. ie. render w3c standard pages on devices etc. and that’s it.

or

b. create a new breed of browsers for devices which are standard compliant and which have unrestricted access to native constructs like - sms, location from triangulation, location from gps, cameras, bluetooth

Just think of the possibilities this will open up…

Not only will we be able to build applications that port easily from device to device as long as the web standards are adhered to (..has its own issues, but, I would take this problem over the porting hell that is moving applications in j2me from one manufacturers stack to another) but, mobile web apps will actually be using the capabilities of the device. Location based webapps that actually use the location of the device directly, address books and calendars that sync with your favourite web-service directly - the list is endless. All the web-services you consume on the web but tailored specifically to your devices browser platform.

It also represents a chance to leap-frog over a decades worth of lack of tools and best practices in the mobile space and join a community of web developers that is alive and teeming with ideas and open source initiatives. The developers at apple, ms and google need to think of ways to make the mobile web more accessible through the devices they support, but, not just to the point of rendering the pages but allowing a more direct interaction between javascript (maybe>) and the devices native app store. Opera as a platform was supposed to address this very problem, but I think they’ve failed or given up that fight and are focused on the status quo.

It will take a revolutionary idea for a product/device or the release of a more complete mobile browser SDK to act as the catalyst in this process. Rethinking the browser on the mobile device is going to provide options for both consumers and content developers. The carriers can gain as well with increased ARPU with data plans that users will need to access all this web content.