GigaOM takes a look at the breathless posturing coming out of the Mobile World Congress about the sunny future of using mobile devices to use the Web, and examines it with some skepticism. The verdict: “There’s too much variation in operating systems and end devices.” Because the platform situation is so balkanized, it’s too difficult to build any kind of platform that will work consistently across mobile platforms.
There’s too much variation in operating systems and end devices.
Arggg, where’s Microsoft when you need it to monopolize y homogenize the market?
Unable to get a foothold. Ain’t it grand? 🙂
There’s no such thing as too much variation in operating systems PROVIDING said OSs conform to agreed standards rather than trying to rewrite the rule book to lock out competition (classic case study: Microsoft Internet Explorer).
Web developers are not without any blame either. I’ve lost count of the number of sites I’ve visited which have been broken (some more so than others) due to lazy web developers only supporting IE and Firefox.
My bank recently “enhanced” their online banking portal. This was supposedly done to give the customers a better online banking experience; my personal opinion is that it is more complex and obtuse now. However, not only is it less accessible from a desktop browser standpoint (broken stuff in Safari and Firefox 2.x so far), it is no longer even possible to access it on my Palm Treo. On the surface, my phone’s Blazer browser meets all the stated requirements, but it is not useable at all.
The older banking system was simple, accessible, and fast. The new system appears to have been deliberately made inaccessible to mobile browsers without explicitly naming them as incompatible, along with being slow and confusing. Though the old system was not technically written to any mobile browsing standard, it was close enough to the W3C standards that it rendered gracefully and was fully useable from a small device. The new system seems to be some ungodly mesh of bad javascript and bits and pieces of AJAX-style workflows that don’t come together very well.
To me this speaks of a huge leap backwards in technology-friendly banking, and it’s making me seriously consider switching to a bank that “gets it” in this age of ubiquitous mobile computing.
What I would rather see is for my bank to implement a simple, small, fully accessible login specifically for mobile devices, and some simple user agent sniffing can send the browser to the appropriate page. I realize this is a lot of work for what may be a very small segment of the customer base, but a bank that doesn’t look towards the future may just get left behind.
All that being said, it would probably be more doable (and possibly already be done) if there was a defined standard for mobile web browsing. I look forward to the day I really can do most everything with my mobile that I do with my Mac, regarding the Internet anyway.
Edited 2008-02-16 04:25 UTC
Sure, I use it when I absolutely have no other choice but, as you’d expect, the current input devices are too klunky and tedious to make mobile devices a serious platform for browsing the Web. It works in a pinch, but I’d rather chew broken glass than have to use it in lieu of a laptop every day.
Boohoohoo, all platforms are different! Cry me a river. Isn’t that what standards are for? Use them!
And the nice thing about standards in general, and in the mobile pone market in particular, is that there are so many to choose from! 😉