The Mobile Web - Why should you care? in detail

I man­aged to knock the bat­tery loose from the audio recorder some time dur­ing my present­a­tion and prob­ably ruined the chance of a pod­cast. So here is the script for the present­a­tion. I did not stick to the script com­pletely, par­tic­u­larly after being told I had a minute left at slide seven. It does cover the main points of my present­a­tion, in more depth than the slides (1.7Mb PDF).

Slide one

Hi for those those who do not know me my name is Nick Cowie and tonight I will be talk­ing on mobile web brows­ing. Note I am not be talk­ing about the amer­ican style of mobile web brows­ing, of tak­ing your Mac­Book to Star­bucks and mak­ing use of the free wifi to browse the web while drink­ing a latte. I am talk­ing about the Japan­ese style of mobile web brows­ing, which is gain­ing pop­ular­ity world wide includ­ing Aus­tralia of brows­ing the web from your mobile any­where you can get a signal.

For those who do know me, might won­der why some­body who did not own a mobile phone until two years ago is so inter­ested in mobile web brows­ing, I will explain shortly.

So I am no Brian Fling, I am not going to tell you the best way to build web sites for mobile browsers. You will have to go to Web Dir­ec­tions, hope­fully for that. Instead I will prob­ably raise more ques­tions than I answer. My aim tonight is to increase your aware­ness of mobile web brows­ing and get you think­ing about it.

Slide two

What got me inter­ested in mobile web brows­ing. First the Apple iPhone. This is no great advance­ment in mobile tech­no­logy, there is noth­ing the iPhone can do that the cur­rent crop of smart phones can not do. How­ever, other than the New­ton, Apple has been spot on bring­ing their products to mar­ket at the right time. Much has been made of the inclu­sion of the web brows­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies of the iPhone, even though it is severly ham­strung by it’s tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion part­ner in the states with it’s 2G network.

The second was my pur­chase of a net con­nect card and mobile data con­tract. The pri­cing has come down dra­mat­ic­ally over the past year. For $50 a month, I get 1Gb of traffic and at good speeds, in down­town Kwin­ana I am get­ting bet­ter than 512kps. A friend just returned from Sydney and said he was get­ting close to 1.5Mps in the city centre. Tel­cos here are also offer­ing good mobile brows­ing deals, Tel­stra are offer­ing unlim­ited web brows­ing from a cer­tain hand­set for $30 a month and 3 have just released their X-series with 500Mb and other extras for $20 a month.

Slide three

Here a few fig­ures to show long term future for mobile web browsing.

There are 800,000 800 mil­lion PCs in the world, about 1 in every 8 people

1.1 bil­lion people or 1 in every 6 people accessed the inter­net. The dif­fer­ence between PCs and inter­net users is due to people:

• shar­ing computers;
• using inter­net cafes;
• using the inter­net from work, and
• access­ing the inter­net on mobile devices.

There are 1.2 bil­lion fixed tele­phone lines in the world. Now to increase con­ven­tional inter­net use you need to increase both the num­ber of PC own­ers and tele­phone lines. That is not a cheap option.

In 2005 there was 2.2 bil­lion mobile phones users in the world, cur­rently the estim­ate is 2.5 bil­lion. At least every third per­son has a mobile phone and the num­ber is stead­ily increasing.

Slide four

There are a couple of points I want to make with these stats.

That ten years ago 50 mil­lion used the inter­net now 1.1 bil­lion people do.

Cur­rently 50 mil­lion people browse from a mobile phone and all indic­a­tions that it will take far less that ten years to get to a bil­lion, I have seen pre­dic­tions that by 2010 mobile inter­net users will exceed PC inter­net users, but because mobile web brows­ing lags behind other mobile inter­net use it will take another couple of years for mobile web brows­ing num­bers to exceed PC browsers.

Slide five

Sites already provid­ing mobile versions.

I have seen research from the UK that lis­ted the most pop­u­lar sites for mobile web brows­ing. They were email, search engines, news, sport and weather.

It is not sur­pris­ing that the big play­ers in those fields have already got mobile ver­sions of their sites. The meth­od­o­logy var­ies slight with Google detect­ing mobile browsers and redir­ect­ing. Most oth­ers expect users to find them.

Slide six

Why build for mobile now?

• 16.5 mil­lion mobile phones in use in Australia;
• 28% of Aus­tralian mobile phone users access the inter­net from
  their phone;
• 12% of Aus­tralian mobile phone users browse the web from
  their phone;
• Web browsers becom­ing more com­mon in mobile phones;
• Mobile ser­vice pro­viders are encour­aging mobile web use;
• The aver­age life span of a mobile phone < 2 years;
• The aver­age life span of a web­site is?

Slide seven

Prob­lems — Browsers

As web developer and design­ers we know not all browser are cre­ated equal. Well the mobile web is far worse. It makes Nets­cape 4 and Inter­net Explorer 4 issues a piece of cake.

There are estim­ated 50 dif­fer­ent browsers mod­els for mobiles and they do work differently.

For example opera and min­imo (FF) dis­plays a web from left to right, while IE it is from the top down.

Both CSS and JavaS­cript imple­ment­a­tion var­ies dra­mat­ic­ally from browser to browser. The good news is that it is get­ting bet­ter, but res­ults are so varied.

Slide eight

Usab­il­ity, I am afraid that Jakob Neilsen is not fam­ous enough to have his own min­fig, so here is Tim Berners-Lee in lego.

We are prob­ably lucky the US mobile ser­vice is so bad that Jakob has not taken up using a mobile browser because there are a lot of usab­il­ity issues.

lim­ited input options, most have a 12 but­ton keypad and no point­ing device. Look at using access keys for navigation

the typ­ical mobile has screen size is some­where between 160 and 240 wide and 200 to 360 pixels high and por­trait in orientation

if you thought your reg­u­lar inter­net user were impa­tient, mobile users are more so, they want the inform­a­tion on their screen now.

Mobile users are by nature on the move, so don’t expect the same level of atten­tion as some­body sit­ting at a desk in front of a computer.

Slide nine

One site or two, should you build a sep­ar­ate site for mobile users? That is up to you. I used to be a strong believer in one site for all users, for ease of main­ten­ance. How­ever, with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of mobile brows­ing issues, such as how people use mobile browsers, screen size and nav­ig­a­tion I see the advant­ages of two sites and would prob­ably build two ver­sions of the same site, unless the ori­ginal site was small in both pages and content.

Slide ten

The future?

Japan, South Korea and even China to lead, Aus­tralia is still about a year behind the lead­ers in mobile tech­no­logy use.

Expect, Aus­tralia to have a big increase in mobile web brows­ing in the next two to three years, with 3’s X-series and Telstra’s hiptop2 start­ing the change.

US and Canada will arrive later, they are prob­ably a year or more behind Australia.

Mobile web apps the next big thing? Stole that from the mobile2.0 con­fer­ence pro­pa­ganda, but yes it is very likely, flickr has already started.

GPS in phones will allow web­sites to know where vis­it­ors are, good for com­mer­cial sites to dir­ect cus­tom­ers to nearest loc­a­tion, far bet­ter for social apps.

Slide eleven

Sug­ges­ted Reading

• W3C Mobile Web Best Prac­tices 1.0
• Dot­Mobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide
  Writ­ten by Brian Fling, it shows you the best way to build sites for mobile browsers.
• Blue Fla­vor
  The agency that was setup by Brian Fling and oth­ers, the blog con­tains many inter­est­ing posts about mobile devices.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under mobile web, presentations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.