Rambling thoughts and observations

Notes from a presentation by Chris Loh and Shanan Holm of 3months, 8 December 2009.

Chris discussed the “walled garden” effect not allowing non-approved applications to feature on mobile phones. There has recently been a change to the “open allotment” idea of applications.

What is a Smartphone?
Mobile phones have basic apps on them. Hand-held PDA’s have rich apps but they are not connected - a user must sync them to a PC. Converged devices became “Smartphones”. Now a users calendar is always live and online. Usability has become better with newer smartphones able to do tasks. (See Jakob Nielsen’s article on Mobile Usability, July 2009).

The smartphone has a range of services (phone, music player, Internet browser), connection platforms (cellular, wifi, bluetooth, NFC - Near Field Communication, RFID sensor) and a range of sensors (GPS, camera, compass, accelerator). Multiple functionality means being able to integrate new capability into the chip.

Soon every phone will be a smartphone. The competition will go up and the price of phones will go down. Android is being used on many phones. (A good definition of Android is available on Wikipedia). Phone sizes were getting smaller in size, but the smartphone has a larger screen and is a multi-function device. The smartphone is a platform for web and apps.

Native App vs Web App
As browsers became more complex, more apps could run via the web. Creating websites for mobile phones where the screen size real estate needs to be considered as important. Top level domain names are usually .mobi (e.g. bbc.mobi) or m. (e.g. m.twitter.com or m.facebook.com). Applications for mobile are good for on the go “live” real time information.

Native App, caused by device fragmentation (different types/brands of phones) vs Mobile Web Apps, which can be used across many different types and brands of phones.

Native Apps can run in offline mode. This option is underway via HTML5 for the mobile web - this will be useful for having offline on an airplane, for example, where you can only run Gmail offline if Google Gears is installed on the phone. With HTML5, this functionality will be implemented.

Wikipedia has a good definition of the Mobile Web.

88% of iPhone users browse the web from their mobile, 92% of these are Android users. Only 14 % of all phone users have iPhones.

Mobile web = Apps + Web Access

iPhone phones and iPhone apps have grown. There has been a move from voice/SMS to data (web apps). Mobile phones have gone from being just phones to data-centric devices. They have gone from slow connections to fast connections.

Facebook mobile is the largest phone app. Users are 50% more active on Facebook mobile than desktop users with Facebook.

Smartphones have customisation that helps you find a location and a direction. If a user searches for the term “coffee” on Google on a mobile smartphone (geo dataset), the user will be directed to the nearest coffee house. The example given was to the coffee house in the same building as the user. Privacy is an issue at the heart of location-based services such as Foursquare.

“Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices, and game. Users “Check-in” at venues using text messaging or a device specific application.” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare_(service).

There are also no location examples such as:- 2D barcodes; RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification); image recognition such as Google Goggles where a user can take a photo of what they are looking at, for example, a magazine, and Google will take the user to the magazine web page; NFC mobile payments (using the cellphone to pay for items).

What are some of the things we should be doing in terms of the mobile web?

• start with low effort and high value;
• understand your market and user;
• understand users goals;
• build small amounts and let users use it.

Unoptimised sites = poor experience. Websites built for mobile devices take 2 seconds to load on a mobile, whereas a standard website viewed on a mobile on average takes 25 seconds. This is too long. Your business will lose users. Ensure that your business has simple apps that tie in with your business.

See also 3months blog article “Bringing mobile apps to the web”.