Archive for the 'mobile web' Category

While look­ing for inform­a­tion on mobiles, I came across 12 Myths of Mobile User-Interface Design by Aaron Mar­cus from Feb­ru­ary 2005. So I decided to review the myths given the arrival of the iPhone 3G in Aus­tralia and other recent changes.

The Myths

Do you have a Win­dows Mobile device and are jeal­ous of the Safari Browser on the iPhone? But can not or do not want to get an iPhone, well the latest Opera browser for Win­dows Mobile 5 or 6 is for you …

A lot of Aus­tralian are unim­pressed with the offer­ings of three tel­cos offer­ing iPhones in Aus­tralia. All the plans are heavy on tele­phony and light on mobile data. The excep­tion are the Optus who are offer­ing low tele­phony, mod­er­ate data plans. For $39 a month you get 500Mb of data + $34 worth of […]

Do I want one of those brand new 3G iPhone, YES. But I will wait until what will and see what is going to hap­pen with the offers by all the major tel­cos in Aus­tralia, before committing…

The W3C are run­ning a free online train­ing in Mobile Web Best Prac­tices, you can find out more on the course over­view page or you can head straight over to the regis­tra­tion page. You might need to rush see­ing the course is lim­ited to 100 participants.

Update 1720WST 5 May 2008 , just got informed by W3C the course is now full, the 100 places where filled quicker than they expected.

Hat tip to Scen­ario Girl. See you on the course Lisa.

I thought I got a good deal at the begin­ning of the year when I signed up for mobile broad­band for 1Gb at $49 a month. Reg­u­lar read­ers will know that got upgraded to 2Gb a month, for the same price a few months ago. Well there is now a price war on, with Voda­fone offer­ing 5Gb for $39 a month, then 3 offer­ing 2Gb for $24.50 a month and now 1Gb a month for $14.50 (for 3 cus­tom­ers only), for lim­ited time only.

There are a few things to be wary of, to get a free modem you need to sign up for a 2 year con­tract. Data is cal­cu­lated on both uploads and down­loads. If you exceed your monthly limit, you are charged at a rate of $0.10 a Mb. The ser­vice is lim­ited to met­ro­pol­itan area of major Aus­tralian cit­ies. Which means …

Oh what a lovely browser </sarcasm>. I admit I do use it for brows­ing the mobile web (i.e. site designed only for mobile browsers), it works well with those sites and I need one keypress less than Opera Mobile when paging through the mobile twit­ter site. How­ever, if required to visit a tra­di­tional web site on my phone, I will use Opera Mobile. IE mobile’s ren­der­ing of tra­di­tional web pages is com­ical enough to almost win me a Web­Jam (and I did not have to dance).

The fun really starts when you try to build a site that works in both tra­di­tional web browsers and mobile browsers. IE mobile applies both screen and hand­held stylesheets. Which can cause chaos. Even know­ing this is not enough, I you try to coun­ter­act the screen stylesheet by remov­ing styles in a hand­held stylesheet, you need to do it properly.

Stew­art Green­hill aka the Green­Guy has pos­ted the video of my ses­sion the social net­work in your pocket on viddler.

If you wondered why it has been quiet around here lately, I have spent the last two weeks research­ing and pre­par­ing for my present­a­tion at Pod­Camp Perth 2007.

| View

Car­ni­val of the Mobil­ists #88 is out and yes that present­a­tion is in it. For those who do not know, the Car­ni­val of the Mobil­ists is a weekly col­lec­tion of blog posts on mobiles and wire­less in one spot. Which moves from blog to blog each week to share the workload

As usual there are a num­ber of very good post, which I am cur­rently reading.