The Mobile Web
"There are more mobiles than credit cards. There are more mobiles than automobiles. There are more mobiles than TV sets. There are more mobiles than fixed/landline phones. There are twice and many mobile phones as internet users and three times as many mobile phones as PC owners. 30% of the global population carries a mobile phone. Over 30 countries have achieved more than a 100% mobile phone penetration rate [this includes the UK]. In markets such as Finland, Italy and Hong Kong the typical first-time mobile customer is under the age of 10."
These statistics are taken from a presentation by Tom Hume at the d.construct 2005 conference. Admittedly they are slightly out of date, however, they demonstrate clearly that the mobile has a reach it's larger-screened cousins can never hope to match, and show the quite staggering potential of the mobile web.
There have been a number of recent initiatives to attempt to gear the industry towards realising this potential.
You will probably have noticed the way manufacturers are cramming more and more features into our handsets. 2003 saw the launch of 3G in the UK giving the consumer access to data at around 300kbps (that's about 10 times faster than what was previously possible); 2007 will see the arrival of so-called 3.5G which should provide us with data at 1.8Mbps (that's 6 times faster again - comparable to current fixed-line broadband access). Many handsets are also being produced with wifi connectivity built in, allowing users to surf the internet at high speed wherever they can find a hotspot without paying their mobile operator a penny. Another feature that is becoming more common is GPS integration which should pave the way for location-based services, for example a business directory site where you could search for restaurants within walking distance of your current location.
Another development last year was the launch of the .mobi domain suffix. The .mobi domain is meant solely for sites that will be accessed by phones and anyone signing up must ensure their site meets a strict set of accessibility standards. There has been some opposition to this idea from Tim Berners-Lee and other members of the W3C who believe this will serve to fragment the web. However, the supporters of the idea will tell you this is not about fragmenting the web, it is about making the web mobile and simplifying the process of finding content to view on-the-go.
Despite this there are still a two major obstacles the mobile industry must overcome before the mobile web will hit the mainstream in the UK. These obstacles are price and content.
To look at the price issue we need to consider what people have come to expect to pay for internet access. BT's entry-level package gives its subscribers 2GB of data for £17.99 every month. That's works out at about £9 per GB and is possibly the least competitive package available in the UK. Contrast this with the prices mobile operators expect you to pay:
- Vodafone charges £2.35 per MB (that's £2,350 per GB)
- Orange charges vary between £4 for 4MB and £16 for 25MB (that's £640-1000 per GB)
- O2 charge £3 per MB (that's £3000 per GB)
T-mobile bucks the trend slightly in offering "unlimited" mobile internet access for £7.50 a month. Unlimited that is except that you can't use it as a modem for a normal computer, audio/video streaming, peer to peer file sharing, internet telephony, or anything else that means they have to give you any bandwidth. On the plus side this does mean that you can check your email and read text based content without worrying about the bill you'll receive at the end of the month. O2 tried a similar scheme in 2006, before bining it a few months later - unfortunately some of their subscribers weren't aware of the change in their agreed billing rates and one poor girl from Welshpool in Powys ended up with a £3,327 phone bill on her doorstep.
The fact is that internet users have become accustomed to paying next to nothing for access to all the multimedia orientated delights web 2.0 has to offer, and the mobile operators are expecting users to pay through the nose so that we can have access to a smaller, mainly text-based version of web 1.0.
This is an issue the mobile operators will no doubt have to face up to, and sooner or later they are simply going to have to just write off the huge sums they paid for their 3G licenses. However, there is one other problem with the mobile web, and that is that there really isn't very much mobile specific content currently available.
This is in part due to the lack of demand, which is itself simply a symptom of the price of access issue, however, perhaps more worrying is the fact that actually developing mobile orientated websites is a far from simple process.
If you want to create a site for the traditional web, testing it is fairly straightforward: you download a couple of browsers to your Windows PC, check that the site still works in each one, have a quick look on a Mac, and if you really want to be thorough you boot up Linux and check it in that environment too. In total you've checked the site in three different operating systems and in something like five or six different browsers, and that should cover 99.9% of your audience. Mobiles are a completely different ball game. There are around 160 different devices out there and over 40 different browsers, therefore testing a site is a major headache and a huge undertaking.
Anyone who runs a website and wants to know what they should do about making content available to a mobile audience basically has four options:
1) Do nothing. A number of mobile browsers have learnt to deal with sites designed for a bigger screen. They all do this "site miniaturisation" in a slightly different way and so by chosing this option you lose control of the look and feel of your site. Of course there's no guarantee you site will work at all in some devices, but on the whole as long as it is built using web standards most users should still be able to find your content.
2) Strip out the CSS and Images. It is posisble to use a piece of code to discover if the site is being viewed on a small screen device. Therefore one option is to strip out all the CSS and images and just provide the raw XHTML to the browser. This solution means that users will definitely be able to view your content, but all styling of that content is lost and brand identity is sacrificed.
3) Create a separate style sheet for handheld devices. This is a good idea and ultimately is what organisations such as the W3C would like to see made possible. However, mobile browsers are extremely inconsistent in the way they interpret style sheets, some don't recognise them at all and others will interpret the CSS in completely unpredictable ways.
4) Create a separate version of the site specifically designed for smaller screens. This involves purchasing a .mobi domain and stripping down the content from your main site, providing only one or two images per page, and sizing them appropriately to reduce download times. Another important point to consider if you're going to put all this time and effort into creating a whole new site is what content are your visitors likely to be interested in if they are on-the-go. - For example, perhaps users are unlikely to want to go through a full purchase process on an ecommerce site whilst sitting on a bus. However, they might be interested in doing a quick price check on your site while they are standing in your competitor's store, considering whether or not to make a purchase.
Whatever your thoughts about the mobile web, it will doubtless arrive sooner or later. You only have to look at Japan and South Korea, where accessing the internet on mobiles (or handheld multimedia devices) is huge, to see what is in store for us in a few year's (or maybe even month's) time. You need to start thinking now about what content your site should provide and how to make it as accessible as possible.
To help get your imagination going I'll leave you with a description of an application called Golf Manager currently available in South Korea
Golf Manager, is an application which has details of most of South Korea's golf courses with exact pin placements updated daily. As well as providing you with info on the course, it enables you to use your GPS-enabled handset as a virtual caddy. It knows where the pin is and is able to plot your exact location on the hole, therefore it can calculate how far you are from the hole, enabling you to select more precisely which club to pick and how hard to hit the ball.
If you have any questions or comments about this article, or anything else on the site please feel free to email me at info@prwdesigns.co.uk.