The mobile experience has come a long way from it's original WAP roots, which was functional but never took off. iMode always intrigued me, but I never got around to trying it and by the time Telstra hooked it up in Australia 3g was available. So far my experiences surfing the web on my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson W880i) have left a lot to be desired. The best I've seen it was when I used it as a "modem" for my Macbook via Bluetooth. Interestingly enough, when hooked into a PC the speed is quite reasonable, but using the phone's browser seems to display pages extremely slowly. This could be due to the handset's limitations, or due to the browser, or even the site serving the content tailoring it on the fly for mobile consumption (and thus taking a performance hit). Regardless, it results in a very painful experience and not one that I use very often.
As I see it, the challenges are many. Input is the first major stumbling block. It can be quite jarring having to jump out of the web page into the standard SMS text entering screen then back again. While predictive text can speed things up a little, things like user names and passwords can be tedious to enter. The web pages themselves are viewable, but lack the punch of their PC equivalents. Connection times are slow.
Of course, I'm only speaking from my limited experiences. I'm yet to see an iPhone in action (because I live in Australia), so I'm eagerly awaiting it's release. Hopefully Apple will hook up with my current provider (Virgin) so I can just upgrade my phone. I think in the mean time I'll do some more research.
TBC.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The Mobile Web
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1 comment:
And what is your experience after using iPod? as far as I remember browsing the web was quite fine (due to safari browser and multi touch screen). I don't know if it's easy to input any data - I haven't tried. I thought that qwerty keyboard is the solution - but it isn't. My fingers are to thick for most of this keyboards.
In other countries there is also another problem - price of the connection. there are no, or not enough, or not cheap enough fixed price data plans for using mobile web.
But there is a bright light ahead - mobile industry is growing and evolving very fast.
But there are other aspects of "mobile web". Do you know zyb.com or qik.com?
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