Tuesday, October 1, 2002
The Mobile Internet - does it exist?
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 01:00 PM
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Failure_and_Future_of_Mobile_Content
Andy had a very good thought this morning on the mobile internet, and I largely agree with him. But in some ways, there is a mobile internet. No, it isn't inside some carrier's or ISP's walled garden, but it is in the content we get. Fire up My Yahoo on your Pocket PC and prepare to wait and scroll. I have been making pretty heavy use of the MSN mobile pages on my iPAQ. They give tons of information that is formatted quite well for mobile devices. I know the internet is not the same as the web, but for mobile users, there are really only three things that matter - email, messaging and the web. The latter is the one that is sorely lacking on your PDA or smartphone and that is the big one most people associate with the internet.
So for me, the mobile internet is the internet on my mobile device, and to work, it must be aware it is not on a 17" screen, and that is mobile content. Ted Ladd at Brighthand has written an article on what has gone wrong with mobile content in the past and where he sees it going in the future. He also tackles some of the myths surrounding the lack of or failure of some of the mobile content.
As a short aside, Brighthand launched its new site today and one of the goals was more content. Given they have three new articles on the front page, I would say Ed Hardy, the new Editor-in-Chief, formerly of Palm InfoCenter, is well on his way to fulfilling that promise.
Andy had a very good thought this morning on the mobile internet, and I largely agree with him. But in some ways, there is a mobile internet. No, it isn't inside some carrier's or ISP's walled garden, but it is in the content we get. Fire up My Yahoo on your Pocket PC and prepare to wait and scroll. I have been making pretty heavy use of the MSN mobile pages on my iPAQ. They give tons of information that is formatted quite well for mobile devices. I know the internet is not the same as the web, but for mobile users, there are really only three things that matter - email, messaging and the web. The latter is the one that is sorely lacking on your PDA or smartphone and that is the big one most people associate with the internet.
So for me, the mobile internet is the internet on my mobile device, and to work, it must be aware it is not on a 17" screen, and that is mobile content. Ted Ladd at Brighthand has written an article on what has gone wrong with mobile content in the past and where he sees it going in the future. He also tackles some of the myths surrounding the lack of or failure of some of the mobile content.
As a short aside, Brighthand launched its new site today and one of the goals was more content. Given they have three new articles on the front page, I would say Ed Hardy, the new Editor-in-Chief, formerly of Palm InfoCenter, is well on his way to fulfilling that promise.
