Recently, a friend who co-founded a local social networking site, asked for my views on how the mobile web would look like.
"Will people want websites created specially for the mobile phone or do you think people would simply prefer to view sites from the World Wide Web?"
I told him it depends on whether he's taking a short term view or a long term view.
In the short to medium term, because of form factor and bandwidth issues, the only kind of sites most people will want to view on their phones will have to be those optimized for the mobile phone.
A good example of a corporate site built to fit a small screen is BMW's mobile site: www.bmw.mobi. If you want to see how to efficiently fit a magazine onto a phone's screen, check out BusinessWeek's mobile site: www.businessweek.mobi. And if you want to see a really basic, no-frills mobile site, check out the official mobile site of my alma mater, the University of Texas: www.utexas.mobi.
You can test these out on your mobile phone provided you've got 3G, EDGE or GPRS service. If you don't and still want to have a sense of what they look like, you can view them on your computer screen too. They will look a bit odd though, because they are all designed for the small screen!
Notice how all these examples end with ".mobi" (also known as DotMobi). Not all mobile sites have to end with .mobi but it's a convention that's catching on. It's actually a top-level domain meant for websites that are optimized for the mobile platform. Its backers include some of the biggest names in tech: Google, Microsoft and Nokia, just to name a few.
DotMobi has formulated best practices (which can be found on its website: pc.mtld.mobi) for mobile content which outlines ways for developers to give users a good experience on the mobile.
Since all DotMobi sites must be optimized for viewing on a mobile phone, the main advantage for consumers is that if they visit a DotMobi site, they can be assured that the site has been optimized for the small screen.
There are some technical solutions that can adapt a standard website for the mobile phone. Micro-browsers like Opera Mobile, for example, can fit any website to the small screen but the results might be less than satisfactory. Formatting and layout could be messed up.
This would never happen with a DotMobi site. There is no need to compress any of its sites for the small screen as they are, by definition, created for the small screen.
The main disadvantage of this approach though is that the publisher of the site has to build two versions of their site: one for .com and one for .mobi. Many companies and organizations simply will do without the latter, since browsing the web on a mobile phone is not currently a particular popular activity.
There are two reasons why accessing the world wide web is such a crappy experience on the phone: form factor and bandwidth.
Let's start with form factor. Young people may be able to do amazing things on the phone, but let's face it, even for the most dexterous teens, navigating and inputting text is infinitely harder to do on the mobile than on the laptop. And no matter how good your eyesight is, you'll still have to squint to read the contents on a small screen.
Next, the bandwidth problem: data access speeds are neither great nor reliable when compared to fixed line broadband. People who would want to access the web on their phones are likely to be tech-savvy types who have fixed broadband at home. The mobile experience will inevitably pale in comparison because of the lower speed.
Sure, if you subscribe to HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access), which is an improvement over 3G, you'll get pretty impressive speeds. But how many people are willing to pay for that? And not to mention the high cost of HSDPA-enabled phones (only the very high end ones have this capability).
In the long run, though, there will not need to be mobile optimized sites simply because form factor and bandwidth issues will be resolved.
Apple's much anticipated iPhone is said to be the first phone to be able to give users a real Web experience on the phone. The screen is huge by mobile standards and there's also a unique feature that allows users to expand or shrink the image on the screen with the touch of their fingers. This is still not going to give users the same kind of browsing experience they can get on a laptop, but it's a step in the right direction and more phone makers will be following suit.
With WiMAX poised to be launched in the coming years, bandwidth will be less an issue. Phones could be made WiMAX capable. But even for those who don't have such a phone, HSDPA is bound to become cheaper and therefore more accessible.
In the long run, there may not be a need for specially made mobile sites.