If you want to gain a better idea of how mobile users are using their phone, check out this link below. The press release summarizes an extensive study that Novarra did on mobile internet users.

http://www.novarra.com/news/press-releases/nova…

Also, if you're interested in obtaining the full document PDF of the study, make a request to Novarra by clicking on the link below:

http://www.novarra.com/contact

Some of us out here in innovation-land are working on making it better. Please go on your mobile device, put http://www.whenimmobile.com in the web browser address bar, and take a look at several examples (in the Portfolio section) of the mobile web user experience as it should be.

Thanks for your attention.

Best,
Jonathan Thaler
Founder, When I'm Mobile
http://www.whenimmobile.com

Some of us out here in innovation-land are working on making it better. Please go on your mobile device, put http://www.whenimmobile.com in the web browser address bar, and take a look at several examples (in the Portfolio section) of the mobile web user experience as it should be.

Thanks for your attention.

Best,
Jonathan Thaler
Founder, When I'm Mobile
http://www.whenimmobile.com

Agree totally about the economics, and this is the #1 thing that hampers any company trying to sell app-based solutions to operators.

Interesting observation about google, is that they are very good in doing the “app” work server side.

Coincidentally, I also wrote a blog post about it recently
The Dave Gap. Mary is hot. Drunk On A Bus. Three scenarios for mobilising on-line social networks http://post.ly/1Ssh

I didn't focus on the mobile web as such. We don't need the mobile web, in the same way that we don't need electricity.

To the people writing mobile operator portals, please stop. I'll decide which websites are my favourites, thank you.

ICANN may have approved the .mobi domain for mobile, but there is still much debate about whether or not that is the best solution, and confusion still runs rampant. Both facebook and google seem to have .mobi registered but redirect to .com, and both promote m.****.com rather than ****.mobi

Whatever the reason, I don't know how in general whether there is a mobile optimised version of a site i want to go to, and if there is, what its address is.

Malcolm is also right that for services and sites that one visits frequently, particularly highly interactive ones like email, Facebook or Twitter; an app does often provide a better user experience on mobile than a the browser.

However accessing general web content using single purpose applications is not scalable. There are over 150 million web sites in the world. Most of the web content I consume on my phones isn't available in an app format and probably never will be. The web is huge and diverse. There can never be enough single purpose apps to cover it all and if there were they wouldn't fit on my phone. The web is about hyper-linking and that needs a browser. The real growth in mobile data adoption will be web browser based.

Helping developers think about these strengths and creating mobile sites that will work on practically all handsets — and overcome the hinderances to adoption that you've encountered, Malcolm — is the whole reason we created our free http://mobiForge.com forum as well as our free http://mobiThinking.com forum for marketers.

On a parallel front, given the poor economics of app building for a big world of different handsets, we're firm believers that browser-based mobile sites will continue to blossom and thrive. Note this quote today from BBC News, “Google's engineering vice president Vic Gundotra told the conference that the application store trend is just a fad and that the focus will shift to powerful browsers as the main mechanism for delivering [mobile] services.”

And dotMobi developed — and ICANN approved — the .mobi domain to ensure that businesses have a uniform way to name — and consumers have a uniform way to identify — mobile Web sites rather than deal with the confusion that sometimes exists with mobile Web naming conventions.

If we take a step forward a couple of years to a time where we have web runtimes across many phones including some low end devices. Why wouldn't a developer think of using the “web platform” as the best way of getting a service to a customer? Initiatives such as BONDI which open up some of the mobile phone features like messaging, contacts and calendar will only make this more likely.

So, I am not disagreeing that current content is mainly targeted at PC users. Neither am I saying that the “mobile web” is the only way forward. However, we have to be careful about assuming that users just want fancy websites. Users on the move actually want information quickly, accurately and without huge overheads. The difficulty with providing web services on a mobile phone is that the service needs to support lots of different types of users. But, on the positive side, with the huge numbber of web developers, I see a very rosy future for web applications (either through the mobile browser or as a widget) in the future.

You're right about Twitter though, but that's because the Twitter website is rubbish in comparison to TweetDeck (and others), but that's to do with functions and they could easily incorporate that into a web page.

Agree that Flash is still a pain in the arse (and I'm a designer so I like Flash) as the iPhone (and I suspect other phones / browsers) still won't play nicely with it and appears to have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

I think the real problem is in two parts:

1. data speed to actually download the pages (which will only get faster) and
2. browser capability

…improving both would then get rid of the whole mobile website nonsense – a good browser should be capable of rendering the page quickly, easily and faithfully with no need of a separate graphically sparse and visually boring mobile version with the aesthetics of Teletext.

On the other hand, I've been comparing a couple of Google Analytics Android apps recently and there's no doubt the app experience is wayyy better than the browser one since the GA web site uses Flash graphs/widgets and of course it's not formatted for a 320×480 screen. As far as I can tell there's no mobile version of the GA site which makes the apps particularly handy.

I think we're actually agreeing quite a lot here. There is a bit of semantics going on – by “mobile web” I do mean “using the mobile browser on my phone” and I think you're saying the definition should be broader. I'm not sure where your “web applications” site; they either run in the browser or they don't?

Where we disagree is that I don't think you can say that the shortage of non mobile friendly sites is not a limitation of the mobile web. Or more importantly, I don't think it matters whether it is or not. The reality is that it's a lottery going to any given web site on your mobile phone. So the experience is rubbish.

Lots of ways this could be fixed, including custom mobile site development, which I think is what siruna do? Which kind of implies that there's a problem that needs to be fixed?

(a) that only covers off the millionth of a percent of phone users who have iPhones
(b) it's preferable to use an app, where one exists (LinkedIn, twitter, facebook, etc.)