Mobile Convergence with the Internet
My addiction started when I starting using the internal s60 (Symbian OS browser) web browser to browse the web. Again, this has probably been done ages ago with the corporate Blackberries and Blackjacks, but it is something exciting for an average-joe cellphone user like me. The first thing I tried was connecting to my corporate mail during my holiday (nice one, Dilbert) and I was amazed that I could access and respond to corporate mail. All of this in rich HTML. The next thing I tried was accesing this blog, and guess what, the page loaded up pretty quickly, again with rich text. Google even has their own “mobile” version of their wonderful apps. For the record, I am using Google Calendar, Maps and Gmail on my cellphone now.
Then there’s Facebook and Twitter….and all these apps started leading me to re-think about the importance of the mobile device:-
- According to Gartner Voice (a Gartner Research podcasts), mobile phones convergence are on the rise in the world with cellphones selling like hotcakes in a lot of developing countries like China. This means the market of cellphone users around the world is captivating and cannot be ignored.
- Apple’s strategy to include Safari browser in the iPhone to support Web 2.0 applications is another indication of the importance of the mobile device. A mobile device being a social device will naturally works best for a social networking application such as Facebook, as a user’s ability to post information and to “connect” shouldn’t be restricted by geography (you don’t necessarily need a PC / laptop to do updates).
Nearly ALL mobile phones these days include some form of a highly-advanced browser (MS Mobile uses IE, and iPhone uses Safari). The phone can access the web via a 2G, 3G, 3.5G and WIFI spots. From a developer’s point of view, this means that we should start thinking about the mobile device when creating applications since we would expect a normal average mobile user to try accessing their favourite web applications from the mobile phone. Here’s a picture of what it would look like after mobile convergence.
I believe as the world converges with the internet becoming a “living data cloud”, and with SOA and SaaS-based web applications slowly replacing the traditional desktop application architecture, web content creators who do not take advantage of the mobile phenomenon will be left out since the phone could be used to access information as easily as a laptop/PC. There are also strategic values for corporations to make their Enterprise 2.0 applications fully mobile-compliant (accessing webmail through a mobile phone is a good example to keep productivity on the run outside the office). After all, the application’s presentation layer are always rendered by the same technology.
A mobile car-parking solution anyone?
Really, ALL you need is a rich HTML browser.
Michael,
You make a great point about the importance of mobile applications. My smart phone is my newspaper in the morning. On the way to work I read my RSS feeds using Google Reader, all using a browser that supports rich HTML.
Mobile support is very important for driving participation in the new Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 world.