The mobile web – aging dinosaur

August 13, 2008 – 9:31 am

There was recently a post over at Ajax Blog about Japan’s super-advanced mobile web. Serkan Toto discusses some of the intricacies of the unique mobile web that has evolved in Japan, a country where most people don’t have PCs and almost everyone uses their cellphone to browse the web.

Toto writes:

The availability of cutting-edge phones is one reason why many Japanese people don’t own a PC but would rather browse the web exclusively on mobile devices. And it’s not just for short bursts. They never write SMS either but rather thumb-text push-mails, often containing little icons, emoticons and coded youth slang acronyms. Booking flights online, ordering clothes, auctioning off used stuff, gaming, paying for movie tickets via direct debit: all of this has been possible on Japanese mobile phones for years now.

This is a very valid point. Having spent time in Japan I can definitely say that I, myself, wrote rather long messages on my phone to friends. I also spent time writing full-length emails to people in Japan who were using their phone email address as their sole email access.

However, despite the fact that Japan has a “relatively sound regulatory policy” when it comes to the mobile web, I see the “mobile web” itself as an aging dinosaur, and the iPhone is clearly the reason why.

Firstly, I feel that Japan is relatively unique in its lack of home PC users. The rest of Europe is fairly PC-heavy (just look at the main contributors to open source software and Linux itself), and they certainly have embraced the cellphone. Just this morning a Businessweek author mentioned how she can rent a bicycle in Germany using her mobile. So, the overwhelming majority of current web users probably get their access from both a PC and, potentially, a mobile.

Secondly, the iPhone clearly makes a targeted reference to “the web on your phone.” Not the mobile web, but the real web. The big bad nasty web that has awesome graphical content, multimedia and all the whiz-bang you could ask for. In a world that is continually going “Web 2.0″ where AJAX is almost a requirement to build a modern site, why would an organization want to spend all the time and effort to develop a supremely awesome website, only to have to develop and attrocious dumbed-down lo-fi version for some poor schlub’s tiny little phone?

Let’s face it, folks. The iPhone demonstrates that the world is ready for UMPCs. Because that’s really what the iPhone is. Sure it is a phone, but it basically runs MacOS and can download and install new applications (software) and can do lots of PC stuff – including browse the web (the real web).

As display technology gets cheaper and materials science gets better and battery technology improves, we will definitely see more and more UMPC-like mobile “phones” on the market. As more and more individuals have acess to real software and real web on their mobile device, the need for a separate “mobile” web will fade away.

While WML is an excellent standard and is great in practice, its usefulness is running out, in my opinion. Mobiles just don’t have the same limitations today that they did even just a few years ago. With x86-based mobile devices on the horizon with the evolution of things like the Atom processor, can the “mobile web” really survive?

  • If I can be delicate, I would say that thinking has moved on from these sorts of arguments in the last year or so.

    What the iPhone showed was that actually people *didn't* want to visit the traditional sites designed for sedentary humans, even when the browser could take it. Witness the boom in iPhone specific sites that followed its launch: sites that capitalised on the mobileness of the user. And increasingly these capitalise on the devices' unique features (click-to-call, location information, different UI paradigm etc etc)

    The word "mobile" in "Mobile Web" is an adjective, not a noun. It's a medium designed for mobile *people*, not particularly mobile *devices*.

    (Incidentally, this is entirely consistent with the idea of "One Web". There is one web, but some parts of it are better suited for mobile users than for desktop users. Just as some parts are better suited for German users than American. It's not about the syntax or presentation of the markup, but about giving people what they want in their particular context.)
  • James,
    Excellent comments - thank you!

    I guess I was hung up in how "different" the Japanese i-Mode "web" was, and not sure if it still is. I think you make an excellent point about how sites are capitalizing on the features of the iPhone and the other devices that visit them. This is part of the reason why services like WURFL, a device description repository, are popular. They let the site maintainer know the makeup of the device visiting and can allow customization of the features and layout to suit.

    You are definitely true, the "reality" of the web is that there really only is one web. I guess the point that I was trying to bring out is that as the devices continue to evolve and become more PC-like in their power and functions that we may see less difference between what suits a normal desktop user and what suits a mobile user.
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