Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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Friday, August 04, 2006
Brian Fling's "Designing for Mobile" made public
Brian Fling's presentation about "Designing for Mobile" has now been made available to the public. Little Springs Design provides some well-advised comments, and I provide some of my own below (well-advised or not).
The presentation is really focused on browser-based user interaction with services, even though mobile applications are also mentioned at points. Brian seems more knowledgeable on the first topic than the latter. Oddly he forgets about the issues with scripting of services. It's one thing to create passive web pages in e.g. Dream Weaver etc. It's something completely different to actually "build" an active site where all pages are created on-the-fly on the server, which is the norm today for anything but personal sites, if even that (as most personal sites are now at blogs or social network services).
I agree with most of LSD's comments, and here are my additional ones:
* 3: "Mobile is a zero billion dollar industry": Not quite. It's a huge business for network equipment providers, phone providers and operators.
* 20: "The 2G/3G Transition": It doesn't mention that after-market applications were enabled by the introduction of Java and BREW on featurephones by this time, and that PDAs became smartphones running Symbian OS and Palm OS. The adoption rate of applications was very low though.
* 21: "3rd Generation": Again forgetting after-market applications.
* 23: "Carriers vs Operators": Carriers = Operators. Maybe he means Service Providers or MVNOs when he says Operators.
* 27: "Mobile Devices" / "Look only at mass market phones": I wouldn't say "only", but I agree for the most part. This is clearly true for broad applications like blog editors etc, but also in most cases for corporate applications. When doing my own research I've found that companies don't want to buy smartphones to all employees just to enable e-mail access, time reporting etc.
* 31: "Deck": WML uses a concept called a deck (of cards), but I sense what's meant here is really the set of pages that a user can navigate through on a mobile portal, where access to the most revenue-generating and/or most attractive services should be the easiest etc.
* 48: "Mobile 2.0": It's easy to fall into the buzzword trap. I'd rather say that all the technologies for creating mobile services are in place. It's just a matter of using them, not to invent new buzzwords that points to some future "Holy Grail" technology that supposedly will fix everything, but never does, as the requirements are constantly changing.
* 51: "Web 3.0": -"-
* 52: "Web 4.0": -"-
* 62: There are way more than 200 device models on the worldwide market. Rather 400-500 models. Only browsers are mentioned, not Java, BREW etc.
* 87: Photoshop is mentioned as the design tool for J2ME and BREW, and HTML for WML. That doesn't make any sense at all. Complexity can also be discussed, but I agree that to make use of J2ME and BREW there's need for engineers. The same goes for server-scripted WML, XHTML and HTML. Flash is in my opinion the easiest for non-engineers to work with. Unfortunately it's also the least supported on phones.
Except for letting browsers just take whatever web content there is and squeeze it down for the mobile phone, the main good alternatives for mobile-enabling Internet services today are WAP 2.0 and Java ME. Java ME provides better interaction and access to local phone functionality, but WAP 2.0 has the advantage of being easier to support across many phones.
Designing for Mobile - Blue Flavor
Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » Brian Fling’s “Designing for Mobile”
The presentation is really focused on browser-based user interaction with services, even though mobile applications are also mentioned at points. Brian seems more knowledgeable on the first topic than the latter. Oddly he forgets about the issues with scripting of services. It's one thing to create passive web pages in e.g. Dream Weaver etc. It's something completely different to actually "build" an active site where all pages are created on-the-fly on the server, which is the norm today for anything but personal sites, if even that (as most personal sites are now at blogs or social network services).
I agree with most of LSD's comments, and here are my additional ones:
* 3: "Mobile is a zero billion dollar industry": Not quite. It's a huge business for network equipment providers, phone providers and operators.
* 20: "The 2G/3G Transition": It doesn't mention that after-market applications were enabled by the introduction of Java and BREW on featurephones by this time, and that PDAs became smartphones running Symbian OS and Palm OS. The adoption rate of applications was very low though.
* 21: "3rd Generation": Again forgetting after-market applications.
* 23: "Carriers vs Operators": Carriers = Operators. Maybe he means Service Providers or MVNOs when he says Operators.
* 27: "Mobile Devices" / "Look only at mass market phones": I wouldn't say "only", but I agree for the most part. This is clearly true for broad applications like blog editors etc, but also in most cases for corporate applications. When doing my own research I've found that companies don't want to buy smartphones to all employees just to enable e-mail access, time reporting etc.
* 31: "Deck": WML uses a concept called a deck (of cards), but I sense what's meant here is really the set of pages that a user can navigate through on a mobile portal, where access to the most revenue-generating and/or most attractive services should be the easiest etc.
* 48: "Mobile 2.0": It's easy to fall into the buzzword trap. I'd rather say that all the technologies for creating mobile services are in place. It's just a matter of using them, not to invent new buzzwords that points to some future "Holy Grail" technology that supposedly will fix everything, but never does, as the requirements are constantly changing.
* 51: "Web 3.0": -"-
* 52: "Web 4.0": -"-
* 62: There are way more than 200 device models on the worldwide market. Rather 400-500 models. Only browsers are mentioned, not Java, BREW etc.
* 87: Photoshop is mentioned as the design tool for J2ME and BREW, and HTML for WML. That doesn't make any sense at all. Complexity can also be discussed, but I agree that to make use of J2ME and BREW there's need for engineers. The same goes for server-scripted WML, XHTML and HTML. Flash is in my opinion the easiest for non-engineers to work with. Unfortunately it's also the least supported on phones.
Except for letting browsers just take whatever web content there is and squeeze it down for the mobile phone, the main good alternatives for mobile-enabling Internet services today are WAP 2.0 and Java ME. Java ME provides better interaction and access to local phone functionality, but WAP 2.0 has the advantage of being easier to support across many phones.
Designing for Mobile - Blue Flavor
Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » Brian Fling’s “Designing for Mobile”
