Mobility

Members Only Please!

One interesting mobile phenomenon is the growing number of iPhone specific sites. Facebook, Meebo, Amazon, Google and others have come out with custom tailored sites for the new device.

So this brings up a question going back to the original hype of the iPhone. "It is just the internet..." seems to imply that there is no need for custom iPhone sites, you should be able to browse to the regular web page. So why is it that we see this growing trend? Is this trend an indication that the mobile web will splinter and an iPhone-only branch of mobile content will emerge?

You could argue that this is bad and instead of moving towards some type of unification of mobile content, the iPhone is creating a proprietary branch of the mobile web that will become a "members only" club. I’m not sure this argument totally holds up since everything on the iPhone seems to be based on standards. Any non-iPhone device could browse to an iPhone optimized site, though I’m not sure why you would want to.

Another branch of this argument is that iPhone optimized sites are only being done as a marketing ploy since it is probably true that the underlying content offered on the iPhone site is the same as that offered on the web site or existing mobile site. Why have an iPhone site when you can do the exact same thing on the full site?

I personally think the iPhone optimized sites are a good thing. It serves as a motivator for the content creation industry to think about ways to deliver future content that is fun and exciting, and is delivered in a fidelity that matches the capabilities of the target device. I also believe that people are expecting a different context when they are mobile. Given a choice between navigating to the full site, or one to which understands you are on the go, most will gravitate toward what is fun and easy. "Mobile" is the user, not the device.

I’m sure the motivation by big companies is partly "marketing hype" but it is based on a principle universal to all economies: "they who get the most eye-balls win". So if the mega-mobile marketing companies want to build iPhone specific sites, more power to them. In the long run it should be good for all of us.

Now, what if the iPhone-only sites really enforced "iPhone-only" by doing device detection and excluding all other devices except iPhones? Then I would consider that to be the private club syndrome not totally unlike what IE tried to do in the past.

Undoubtedly there will be other iPhone like clones coming to the market in the near future. The UI features of these devices will also help push the content creation process to the next level. If another iPhone like device emerges with great popularity, it will be interesting to see if the same companies that are now creating iPhone-only sites, will respond in the same way for these new devices.

What would make you switch carriers?

CNET is running a poll asking what would make a mobile subscriber switch carriers.  The results are below (as of the day I am writing this).

About 70% say a better rate plan or better coverage. Only 3% say faster Internet connection while 3x that say better phones. (What would make you switch?)

I'm going to use this poll (as unscientific as it maybe) as an indicator for what gadget enthusiasts, i.e. bleeding edge types, are thinking today.

And from this poll, it would see that we have a ways to go before we start seeing bandwidth hungry mobile users but in-demand phones and phone features may very well lead the way to engendering adoption of the "mobile Web".  AT&Ts strategy to lock-in the slower Edge enabled iPhone supports this thinking. (see Tony's previous post on the iPhone). 

For comparison, it took the Internet almost a decade to see anything close to widespread broadband adoption.

So while debates rage on about what WiMax portends for the future, 3G is plenty fast for most.

And mobile apps that don't require super fast networks (SMS; pix sharing; unified email synching) will be the winners for some time to come.

iPhone Content Conundrum

In my last entry I discussed how the release of the iPhone filled one piece in my personal Digital Convergence (“DC”) puzzle, and I also wondered if the browsing model of the iPhone represented the way people would really want to interact with mobile content.

What if you had a super-computer you could hold in the palm of your hand? What if this device had infinite processing power, unlimited memory, and zero network latency. On top of that it had the best LCD ever seen on the planet. “But” the size of the LCD was only 3x4 inches. What would be the “look and feel” of the content you would expect to come to that device? Would you want to use that infinite power by scrolling a 3x4 inch viewport across content designed for a much bigger desktop visual experience? For the near future we are going to have mobile LCD sizes no bigger than what will fit in a pocket or handbag. Over time the devices will become more powerful, the content also needs to become more powerful in order to match the capabilities of the device.

The “cool” way of browsing on the iPhone seems to be an elegant patch to a problem. The problem is that a lot of our high quality content can only be cleanly accessed in a desktop context. Today, if we “mobile-ize” the content that seems to mean that we strip out stuff, and on top of that we are probably using a completely different set of tools to create that experience.

The concept of the iPhone should serve as a “kick-in-the-pants” wake up call to content creators and development tool designers. All of the neat example applications for the iPhone prove that it is possible to deliver an awesome user experience on a small scale. The content creation and delivery process needs to undergo it’s own form of “digital convergence” so that we don’t have to duplicate all of our work efforts in order to deliver a rich mobile experience, or full blown desktop experience. There needs to be more “smarts” in the content assembly step so that we maximize the fidelity of the device that is asking to use our service.

Does the advent of the iPhone mean we eventually won’t need concepts like “.mobi” which is an identifier for sites that are designed for a mobile context? I would say that the .mobi concept will be needed more than ever. In the iPhone world, I don’t think people are going to continually ask themselves: “Should I go to the wap site, or browse the full desktop page?” The super-tech-savvy might do this exercise, but the rest of us won’t. Over time most people will gravitate to what is easy to access and easy to understand. The iPhone has exposed a “content conundrum” in that we have this super cool device but we need more content that will get us hooked and make us want to use our new devices as our default viewport onto the web. The legacy of the iPhone could be that it provided the “kick-in-the-pants” that we needed in order to take content to the next level. Mobile services that are fun and exciting are going to get the most “on the go” eyeballs. In order to be fun and exciting, the content must take full capabilities of the device in hand.

Side Note: In a lot of ways my company Keynote is “Monitoring the Evolution of Digital Convergence”. This isn’t one of our marketing tag lines, but it is something that we are doing indirectly. A lot of what we do everyday is to keep track of how well digital services work for our customers. These services are typically: web sites, mobile sites, streaming content, VoIP, and applications in general. And we do this over many of the various fixed and mobile network paths that exist around the world. So in many ways we are monitoring the ingredients that make up digital convergence (whatever that turns out to mean).