Dan’s Blog (2.0)

There’s a great article in CNET today about the growth of the Mobile Web (with a focus on the U.S. market). Good balanced coverage except that they missed out any mention of the Mobile Web Initiative. Still, they’ve mostly reached the right conclusions. They’ve said more-sophisticated handsets, improved mobile browsing technology and increased coverage of high-speed wireless networks will improve the Internet mobile experience and attract many more regular users. I agree, but I also think content that is specifically adapted for mobile use (according to the Mobile Web Best Practices guidelines) will be an essential part of making the Mobile Web a success. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I — I’m chairing the group. But if anything, three days with the Nokia N73 and its super-de-duper advanced browser has reinforced my belief. Yes, it’s great to be able to bring up any Web site even if it hasn’t been adapted for Mobile browsers. But it’s a much better user experience when the content or service has been adapted and, for example, you don’t have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page, or encounter AJAX coding that makes frequent http requests (even over 3G this is a real killer), etc.. etc..

In short, the Mobile Web will not be a success if it’s The Web, only Smaller. Content and services must adapt and take into account the specific needs of Mobile Web clients and users, even on advanced devices, even on fast networks.

mobile web

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:52 under Mobile Web, Mobility

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There was a great article in today’s Herald Tribune (my “lifeline” to the US) on the very timely topic of Mobile Advertising. Why timely? Because the next Mobile Monday London event (run with and Sponsored by the MMA) will focus on this very topic. I especially liked this article because it focuses on companies that are going beyond SMS advertising and bringing Web-style banner ads and other innovations to the mobile. You may ask why, as a technologist, I am so excited about the prospect of mobile advertising? Well — look at it this way: advertising is the engine that is powering innovation in companies like Yahoo! and Google right now. If we can bring more targeted advertising to the mobile platform, in a way that preserves user privacy and choice, I believe it will lead to greater investment in the mobile platform by content providers and therefore more sophisticated applications and services being available over this platform.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:42 under Mobile Monday, Mobile Web

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It’s been a day since I’ve taken delivery of my brand-spanking new Nokia N73 (pictured at right). And I have to say, I am pretty impressed. It’s not that it’s some huge revolution in usability and design. It isn’t. It’s a step up from the N70 (pictured at left) which I’ve been using for a few months. But what a step up! It is just a little bit better in almost every aspect of operation and use. Build quality is better. Industrial design is better. It’s lighter. It’s smaller — not by much but just enough that it now fits comfortably in my pocket where the N70 was uncomfortably bulgy. It’s balanced and has a flat bottom — it doesn’t sit precariously on the desk like the N70 did. The materials it’s made out of seem higher quality — maybe it’s just the lack of (or at least minimization of) finger-print-showing chrome accents. Its battery lasts longer. It doesn’t get as hot as the N70 did during long calls. The camera features a real (glass, auto-focus) lens and takes measurably better pictures (though still not up to the quality level of dedicated digital cameras, they are more than usable for most on-line applications and could even be suitable for decent, if small, prints). The lens cover is easier to slide back. The screen is higher resolution and brighter. On the N70, you had to wait a few seconds for things like the call register or address book to come up. This delay is gone on the N73, making the experience of using it as a phone much much much less painful. The PC sync software was a snap to install and get working and synced my 800+ Outlook contacts very quickly over Bluetooth. In short, it’s just that little much better in about every single way and that adds up to a real difference in terms of usability, operation and, yes, sexiness. To borrow a catch-phrase from Oldsmobile, this is not your father’s Series-60.

Special mention has to go to the Web browser (which is built WebCore and JavaScriptCore that Apple’s Safari is built on top of). It is really really good (with a couple of caveats, see below). The browser operates like a PC browser, complete with a little pointing hand cursor that you move around the screen with the 4-way rocker switch. The hand moves semi-intelligently from link to link and, because the screen is smaller than most Web pages, you get a zoomed-in view which shifts around as you move the cursor. You can get a page overview and then zoom into the part of the page you’re interested in. And when you go “back” or “forward” a page, you get neat little page thumb-nails which animate back and forth until you find the page you’re looking for. The result is an amazingly usable Web experience, even for pages that do not adapt for mobile browsers (a bit more on that later). Nokia also recently open-sourced a significant portion of their own work on this browser, which should spur yet more innovation around this platform.

My minor qualms list:

• The built-in web upload application for photos (which is supposed to provide out-of-the-box Flickr integration) did not work. It kept rejecting my username and password and provided no easy way to diagnose the problem. I downloaded ShoZu which worked right away (although ShoZu didn’t have the N73 in its list of supported phones).
• The Nokia S-60 Web Browser works on most sites, but things falls down on things like drag-and drop Ajax applications. Nothing you can do here unless you could add a bluetooth mouse (which you can’t, and in any case that’s hardly “one-handed operation.”)
• The Web browser does not appear to support CSS media queries (or at least doesn’t load stylesheets marked for media type “handheld”). So if I go through the trouble to create special CSS for small-screen devices, this is work is lost on the S-60 Web browser. I think this is a big problem and I hope they fix it in future releases.
• There are two browsers — one for “Wap” and one for “Web.” They even share the same (or a very similar) icon. This doesn’t make sense.
• Final browser nit: when I tried to demonstrate how cool the browser was to my wife by bringing up IMDB while we were out at the pub to answer a question on so-and-so’s filmography … the phone crashed. Oops! It hasn’t done the same since but still — some points knocked off for bad timing.
• Settings are difficult to change. It took me the better part of 20 minutes to figure out how to turn off keypad beeps. That’s a lot of beeps. (It’s in “Profiles”).
• The Lifeblog application holds a lot of promise, but seems to be limited to working with the Typepad software. I would love to use it, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with Blogger.
• It takes yet another kind of micro-flash-card format (MiniSD), which means the card I bought for the N70 is now useless.

That’s about it for now. The long and short of it is — great device. As for the Web Browser — it’s a real innovative leap for mobile browsing. Like any 1.0, there are some problems, but Nokia re clearly on the right track here. My wife has yet to be convinced, though.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:12 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: N73, Nokia, webkit

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Well Pluto got kicked out of the planet club today. It’s now a “dwarf planet.” Don’t they mean “little planet” or “sized-challenged planet”? The insensitivity of it all! Well, I will be sad to see Pluto go, and it will be really difficult to explain it to my 4-year-old. These scientists! They’re all about “a triumph of science over sentimentality” but do they have to deal with the emotional fall-out when you turn a toddler’s world upside down? I don’t think so.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:31 under Science

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There was a great article on BBC News Online last week on the use of the Mobile Web in Africa. It presents some very exciting usage statistics and anecdotal reporting of the growth of mobile browsing in the “developing world.” Exciting because it bolsters my view that mobile browsing will be the primary means that people use to connect to the Web in these countries. I’ll be working over the next few months on helping W3C put together a workshop on this topic — I’ll post more information here when it becomes available. My view is that content creation will be the key issue here. The Mobile Web must not be a one-way medium. If it is to be most useful for communities where the mobile is the primary means of access, it must be as easy to create content as to consume it. This revolution has already taken place on the desktop Web through blogs, wikis, photo/video sharing and so on, but remains a challenge on the mobile.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:21 under Mobile Web, Mobility

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PC Magazine reports that mobile Web usage is climbing (based on some Telephia research. So — what are the salient points of this piece of research? First of all, people want to use the same Web sites they access from the PCs on their mobiles. Secondly, the mobile browser space is much more highly fragmented than the PC browser space. Pretty obvious stuff if you’ve been working in this space for a while (and both topics that we’ve been tackling in the Mobile Web Best Practices group) but it’s good to see more industry voices singing the same tune.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 12:55 under Mobile Web

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Everything needs an upgrade once in a while. I guess it was the Solar system’s time. So now we still have Pluto [great sigh of relief] but … Surprise surprise! There’s a new planet you never heard of before making an appearance between Mars and Jupiter. I dunno — I prefer Solar System Classic to the New Solar System. I really only like the Solar System’s old stuff — you know, in the pre-Ceres days? And don’t even talk to me about Charon and 2003 UB₃₁₃. After that the Solar System really went down hill.

By the way, is this the best shot they could get of Ceres for the coming out party? I mean surely there must be something better in the press file…

Thanks to Scott for the “Solar System 2.0″ meme.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 12:20 under Science

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It seems to me that question of “Is Pluto a Planet” is not science. Yes, a single definition needs to be found and yes this definition needs to be applied to all future astronomical bodies we encounter going forward in order to know if we can call them a planet, but isn’t this is all really a question of semantics rather than, strictly speaking, science? It all seems a bit like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Changing what we call something does not change what it intrinsically is. Pluto will not suddenly disappear in a puff of logic if it is demoted from planet-hood. Having said that, if a definition is reached for which Pluto does not qualify, I say grandfather it in. Make Pluto the historical exception to the rule — a quirky footnote of history. Not because ‘Pluto deserves to be a Planet” but because designating Pluto as such tells an important story about the history of astronomy and how humans’ classification of the world around them evolved. Is that so wrong?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:44 under Science

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