Planet Mobile Web

Carnival of the mobilists no 180 at m-trends blog

Rudy probably resting after Mobile 2.0! /great job as usual.

I think this is a mobile first. Ameren, an electric power utility serving 1.9 million customers in Illinois and Missouri has launched a mobile website that lets customers check the status of service outages. You can search for affected areas by zip code or county. You can also report if your power is out and get real time updates on the progress of restoring power to your specific home or business. The site also has customer service phone numbers (unfortunately NOT click to call) and electrical safety tips.

Nice idea, assuming the mobile site really is updated with status changes in a timely fashion. If the power is out then your desktop PC and WiFi access point and in some cases land-line phone service is going to be out too. Using the mobile site to report a problem or get a status update should be faster than holding for an overloaded telephone support center. I wish all public utilities including power, cable and land line phone companies provided a mobile site like this for outage reporting and status updates. Source: Mobility.mobi

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Search/Local

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 3 “Fair”

Mobile Link: ameren.mobi

Version 1.2 of the W3C mobileOK Checker, released on Tuesday, helps Web authors focus on the failures that most affect the mobile-friendliness of their content, and returns the POWDER document Web authors may use as the basis of a mobileOK^® conformance claim.

Expandable sections

The reports returned by the mobileOK Checker can be long. That's not a bad thing, failure points need to be clarified. That said, scrolling over a long list of details is a tedious process and does not reveal the big picture. The new version adds unobtrusive (as in "works fine when Javascript is not enabled") Javascript to hide/show details. Details are hidden by default, simply click on a failure message to reveal its details!

Severity levels

A missing width attribute on an img element? That's a failure. Using frames? That's a failure. Obviously, the former case only slightly affects the mobile-friendliness of the page, while some mobile browsers won't even be able to render the page in the latter case. And yet both failures looked alike in the report, leaving the difficult task to evaluate the impact of a failure on the overall mobile-friendliness of the page to the reader.

Each failure now comes with a severity level:

• critical: such failures typically prevent the rendering of at least part of the page on most mobile devices! Critical errors are highlighted using a yellow background.
• severe: while such failures usually do not prevent the rendering of the page, they strongly impact the user experience.
• medium: some mobile constraints are not appropriately taken into account, e.g. the browser needs to retrieve more data than actually needed to render the Web page.
• low: useful improvements are possible.

Web authors who only have limited time available to fix failures may want to focus on the most severe failures first. The "Where to start..." section near the top of the report lists the top 3 failures to address right away.

Sprinkle POWDER on your mobileOK content

So your content is mobileOK? Congratulations! You may now wish to identify your content as mobileOK conformant. The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group recently published the W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0 note. It provides an overview of the mobileOK scheme and explains in particular how to claim mobileOK conformance.

One way to make such a claim is to use POWDER. When the page is mobileOK, the mobileOK Checker now returns a POWDER document you may use to advertise that the page is mobileOK^®. For instance, the mobileOK checker returns the following POWDER document when http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ is checked:

For more information on POWDER, please refer to the POWDER Primer.

... and more!

A few other features compose this summer release, such as the size of each resource that composes the page, or the repartition of points lost per severity level. The complete change log is detailed in the What's new? page.

Feedback welcome!

Our Panda Route Travel Planner widget has made it to Nokia’s Ovi Store. The basic idea behind the widget is that you have all your important travel data with you while you are on the go. It works pretty easy: before you start your journey, you enter all the details of your upcoming trip that you need to remember (e.g. airline, flight times, hotel address, rental car reservation number etc.). Then the widget shows you the current step of your journey with all the needed information depending on the current time. On your Nokia N97 home screen this information will be shown too. So you have access to this information without interaction with the application and even when not connected to the Internet.

We also integrated a Twitter feed matching the location of your upcoming destination. It is a great source for any kind of information, such as events, news, things to watch out for or people nearby; and you know what is going on there before you arrive.

The widget is free and available for Nokia N97. So, before you start your next trip, try it out and let us know what you think!

PS:
You will find our widget in the Ovi store under “Nokia N97 devices” under “Applications” -> “City Guides/Maps” or by searching for “panda”.

When I covered Google’s resurrected IGoogle for the iPhone, I complained that Google’s overly aggressive browser detection and redirection  was blocking users of other advanced mobile browsers like S60 Webkit and Opera Mini from the site.

Today, I noticed that Google seems to have made a subtle change to the way it handles unrecognized and unsupported browsers. It’s now possible to force the advanced mobile version to be delivered to any browser.  Visit google.com/m/ig?uipref=6 to try it. You need to use that exact URL, anything else gets redirected  to the WAP version.

Now obviously, the iPhone/Android specific site will not work in just any mobile browser. At a minimum your browser needs to support JavaScript. There are probably some dependencies on features found only in the Safari or Android browsers, so some things may not work. But the iPhone/Android site does seem to work perfectly with Skyfire (image, below) and with some minor usability issues in Opera Mini 4.2 (image, above). It works  partially with Opera Mini 3.1, Ozone, Bolt,  the S60 WebKit browser (image bottom)  .

Admittedly I’ve only tried it with six Gadgets; Google’s Gmail, Reader, News, Calendar and Finance and Logika’s TwitterGadget.  All work as expected with Opera Mini and Skyfire and all but News work in the S60 Browser. The iPhone – iGoogle pages are formatted for a minimum screen width of 320px so you do need to use landscape on QVGA phones to avoid horizontal scrolling. The sole exception is Opera Mini 3.1 which re-flows everything to screen width.  It’s not pretty in 3.1 but is usable.

I tried the iPhone iGoogle with all the other other mobile browsers I could find that support JavaScript with the following results. All except the BlackBerry Browser were tested on a Nokia N95-3 NAM.

Browser	Results
Opera Mini 4.2	All six gadgets work. Expanding and contracting widgets is a little slow and causes the  page to jumps to top  requiring repositioning.
Opera Mini 3.1	Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Finance  and TwitterGadget all work. News doesn’t open. Pages are heavily reformatted and  a bit ugly but usable.
Opera Mobile 8.65	Finance works, Twitter Gadget crashes the browser, Gmail is missing entirely and the other gadgets  open but display no content.
Skyfire 1.2.2.12214	Everything works well.
S60 Browser	News displays no content but all the others work very well.
Ozone 0.01	Gmail, News, Calendar and Finance are OK. Horizontal scrolling is needed in Reader even in landscape.  TwitterGadget is unusable as its login form is missing.  Ozone crashed a couple of times opening different widgets but the crashes were not consistently reproducible;le.
Bolt 1.04	Reader, Gmail and News work well.  Calendar, Finance and TwitterGadget  are missing
UCWEB  6.3 S60 and Java, 6.6 Java,	Page loads but the widgets aren’t clickable.
BlackBerry OS 4.1 Browser	Widgets open expanded. Scrolling is unusably slow.

If you try this in other full-web mobile browsers like Pocket IE, recent BlackBerry browsers and the Telca and NetFront browsers found on Samsung and LG touch screen feature phones please leave a comment letting us know how it works.

Kudos to Google for opening up this back door so that users of unsupported browsers can try this advanced mobile site. Is it useful on any of these browsers? Actually I’d say that it is, particularly with Skyfire, Opera Mini, the S60 browser and Bolt.  Not everything works in every browser but the overall user experience is still better than with the generic version of mobile iGoogle.

The fact that it works as well as it does suggests that Google’s GWT, the open source JavaScript framework which iGoogle for the iPhone is likely built with, is actually able to detect and optimize mobile content for many more mobile browsers than just Safari and the Android browser. I wonder if anyone outside of Google is using GWT for mobile web development and trying to support browsers beyond the iPhone and Android?

Related Posts:
Ozone Browser For S60 and UIQ 3

Just posted at mTrends , the latest Carnival of the Mobilists is now available for your enlightenment and enjoyment.  Host Rudy De Waele has highlighted 16 of the week’s best posts on mobile topics by bloggers from around the world.

Topics include app stores, the impact of mobiles in education and social change, widgets, advertising, mobile statistics, Bluetooth marketing, feature phones vs. smartpones, Intel and Nokia’s new alliance and the launch of two new services promoting networking between mobile entrepreneurs.

There’s a lot more in this Carnival too.  take a look, I’m sure you will find something there of interest. And thank you Rudy for including my post on using the Bing API to create a mobile search engine.

Visit the: Carnival of the Mobilists #180

A new extension to the W3C mobileOK open source library is available that can be used to validate pages served via the file URI scheme. The W3C mobileOK open source Java library has been developed in such a way that it is very easy to extend. We strongly encourage people to extend this library so that a better infrastructure is provided to designers for creating mobile-friendly content.

The mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 Checker library provides a reference implementation of the tests specified in the W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0. This scheme requires that pages are served via HTTP protocol, however there might be some cases where validating pages that are stored locally would be useful. Therefore, this new extension has been created and can be used to validate pages served via file URI scheme. The extension is designed and implemented in a way that does not affect the basic reference implementation. It is also important to note that validating pages only with this extension does not guarantee that the page is mobileOK as some tests require HTTP connection. This extension has to be used in-coordination with the W3C mobileOK Checker and does not replace the core mobileOK library.

If you want to use this extension with the main library then you need to download and install it.

A technical documentation explains in detail how this extension can be installed and used.

This extension has been developed as part of the UK EPSRC funded RIAM (Reciprocal Interoperability of Accessible and Mobile Webs) project with the help of the Mobile Web Best Practices Checker Task Force.

@Tomi ahonen has a thread in forumoxford about the evolution of the smartphone market. Some excellent insights and here is my top factors that I think will impact the evolution of the smartphone market in the near future

For starters, I am not clear what exactly is a 'smartphone'.

Originally, with a Nokia hat on, it was S60 vs. S40 classification. Now it's more complex. - but even with that caveat and considering the iPhone as an example of a smartphone, here are the key factors that will impact the uptake of smarphones in my view

1) LTE deployment - Samsung and LG have learnt from working with the US market. US CDMA operators are deploying LTE more rapidly. Samsung and LG will benefit from that experience and could translate it to other markets

2) Will the open source trend on mobile device lead to more device manufacturers? Giving customers more choice?

3) Supply chain - In 2007 Nokia was the leading supply chain manufacturer for devices . Not so in 2009(its apple)
Supply chain leadership is critical as this article explains

4) Will Android come up with really compelling devices? The ad model will have limited appeal and ultimately will need more in terms of the device

5) Will appstores and apps drive devices? This is critical. Will people buy apps first and then devices? We could extend the same argument to services in general

6) Will Nokia be a brand which shakeup the ecosystem(like the iPhone)

7) What will be the impact of smartphones in emerging markets like India?

8) Will phones continue to be subsidised? Will people pay more for phones when they have recently paid a full price (as happened with the iPhone)

9) The full impact of Microsoft on the smartphone market is still to be fully felt. Windows 7, Azure and Cloud computing in general has the potential to make a difference to the smartphone market by leveraging data in a cloud across the PC and the desktop

10) Will Operators continue to deploy a suite of phones for different customer segments or will they focus on a few phones?

11) Conversely will device manufacturers choose Operators (like the iPhone and the Palm PRE have done) instead of deploying across all Operators.

So honestly, when I went into writing the last couple of postings about widget platforms I did not know about the webinars that had been scheduled by the folks at FierceWireless or AT&T about browsing platforms, but it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one trying to get my head around exactly what is and what isn't possible (and where things are headed) in the browser container and beyond.

read more

Yesterday in the Times Newspaper a great 16 page supplement from Raconteur Media was included on mobile marketing – with great quotes from a number of leading companies and figures from the UK mobile marketing scene – including a number of MMA members.

You can download the PDF or browse the document online.  Either way – it is a great snapshot of what is happening in the UK from a brands, agencies and technology perspective – well worth downloading and reading at your leisure.

Related posts

• MMA Brands and Agencies London event shows the power of mobile
• With mobile it’s personal – marketers must respect customer information
• What does a Mobile Advertising Evangelist actually do?
• Top 50 Australian marketing blogs 2009
• Think big, act small, scale fast – advice from Procter & Gamble on mobile advertising

This is Carnival number six for Barcelona based m-trends.org, where once again host Rudy de Waele gives an overview of qualitative, original and diverse opinions about what’s hot in mobile.

It is another great pleasure to introduce you to edition #180 of the Carnival of the Mobilists (COTM). Nearly four years ago I wrote in my first Carnival of the Mobilists #3 the following introduction: “The more I get into the COTM concept, the more I believe it’s really great for everybody involved. Not only for [...]

This has been bugging me for a while, but I wasn't sure until today whether it was me: There are too many mobile apps.

I don't mean in raw numbers, cause those are great. And I'm not complaining about pointless apps, and games or gimmicks no one uses after the first day. I mean by choice between a mobile (or mobile-compliant) site and an app, there are too damned many apps. And, again percentage wise, way too damned many iPhone apps.

We've discussed this in some detail, and while I cannot seem to find a place to link to it, we've said it a lot in presentations and training we offer. There are a series of choices when going mobile, and a key one is whether you can live with a website or have to live with an app. Neither is inherently better than the other, and your choice (even if it's "both") will always have a downside.

Today, within the last hour in fact, I saw a TV ad for a new iPhone app from Nationwide Insurance.

It's not a general insurance company app (unlike the USAA mobile site Barbara brings up a lot) but seems to be entirely focused on post-accident activities. (I don't have their insurance, so cannot be sure, but Googling presents only this app). So... who will download this? This strikes me as the perfect thing to make mobile, but also the perfect thing to make a mobile website. Why?

• Everyone has a car, not just iPhone users.
• Everyone has accidents, not just iPhone users.
• No one plans accidents, so why would they download this, even for free?
• If you have the presence of mind to remember the app you downloaded three years ago, you have the presence of mind to go web browsing instead.
• If you look at the helpful info on the insurance card, it could tell you to go to a website. Even if it told you to go download an app, the extra step at accident time adds a lot of friction.

Now, this doesn't mean a one-size fits all solution. A Barbara has dicussed here and elsewhere, you can offer multiple variations of that website. Hell, like I said above you can offer both an app and a site. But don't fall into any one trap to keep up with the Joneses, or because your new toy is really cool, so damn everyone else's.

In this case, it might well need a multi-faceted approach. Me? I'd be likely to add an option to the IVR when you call them that says we can let you do this through your phone, just press 7 and we'll send an SMS to the current number. Push message, click and launch a site without typing. Or, if you insist, install an app (unless you are on Verizon, et. al.). Sure, sure. Websites can't take photos generally, but I am sure if that's needed we can find a way for MMS to work.

Any way, think about your customers, or hire someone else to take a good, long, scientific and fact-based look at your customers, and decide on the right solution for them.

---

Little Springs Design is a user experience design consultancy focused exclusively on mobile. For information on contracting our design, strategy, training, and testing services, please contact us today.
See our scheduled training on mobile design, including convenient webinars

Copyright ©2009 Little Springs Design, Inc.

It seems to be raining mobile browser updates.  Yesterday Bolt issued a major update  and it looks like Skyfire did a bug fix release on Monday.  There are quite a few fixes in it.  Here are the release notes.

Skyfire 1.0 update – Release Notes (Windows Mobile and Symbian)

Released: June 30, 2009

Since our Skyfire 1.0 launch, we’ve fixed a few bugs and are releasing this new update. We encourage you to upgrade today by going to http://get.skyfire.com with your device.

1.0.0.12114 Symbian

1.0.0.12113 Windows Mobile touch and non-touch

What’s new in this 1.0 update?

• Reduced Memory footprint. We reduced the memory footprint of Skyfire for both Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. This should help folks reporting issues on memory constrained devices.

Fixes in this release

• History is presented in the proper order.
• Cookies in the UK data center are handled more reliably.
• Sharing links via SMS are handled more reliably.
• Reconnect correctly loads the last page in history plus we’ve improved reliability.
• Site specific issues have been resolved for Rooftopcommedy.com and thefind.com.
• Zoom buttons behave properly and disappear after a couple of seconds.
• Default browser setting works more consistently.
• Text entry on Symbian has been improved with one caveat below.

Known issues in this release

• Multi-line text entry on Symbian: Skyfire might exit the text entry mode when the user is choosing a word from the predictive text list. Plus, using the down key might NOT get you out of text entry mode. If this happens, use enter or center OK. Issues 7149 & 7112
• Superbar state on Symbian: sometimes when you enter into the superbar with the cursor, existing the Superbar via the ‘cancel’ option will navigate to the previous page. Issue 7158
• Change connection on Symbian: Choosing the search WLAN option might not change the WLAN connection. Issue 6633.
• Samsung Jack (AT&T): Because of a security policy on this device, it will not allow uninstall of Skyfire if there is not SIM card in the phone. Simply insert a SIM card.

I’ve installed the new version on my N95-3 without problems.  Interestingly, the version number is 1.0.0.12214 rather than the 1.0.0.12114 mentioned in the release notes.  Typo or a new silent release? In any case, as expected from the nature of the update, there are no obvious changes.  Everything I said in my Skyfire 1.0 review still applies.  Skyfire is the best way to watch web videos on a S60 or Windows Mobile phones, but the tiny fonts at the default zoom level make it less pleasant for sites that are mainly text.

The reduced memory footprint should allow this version to run on phones like the N73 that didn’t have enough RAM to work with Skyfire 1.0. Elsewhere on the web; @kiyo21 reports that pasting text from the system clipboard into the “Enter URL” field now works on S60.  I can confirm that.  A commenter at All About Symbian noted that entering text in web forms seems slower in the new version.  It IS slow although I don’t know if it’s any worse than before.  Skyfire users, what are your experiences with this upgrade?

Related Posts

Skyfire 1.0 Reviewed
Skyfire 0.9 – WVGA Support, Twitter and Facebook Integration
Skyfire Browser Beta 0.85 for S60 – Full Review

So far in my previous few articles on Android I have focused on showing you how to get things done in Android without really spending too much time discussing the visual aspect of Android application development - User Interface design. In this article, and the next, I will walk you through the various elements that make up the UI of an Android application. In this first part of the article, I will discuss the various layouts available in Android to position the various widgets on your screen.

read more

The global Mini cluster was upgraded by the server team Monday evening CET. The main improvements include:

• enhanced site compatibility
  
• a fix for pages with internal links
  
• improved synchronization
  
• binary files are always offered for download
  

Since JavaScript site patches are used to improve site compatibility, an enhancement allowing developers to bypass those patches has been included. The setting is available when entering the "config:" URL, but should always be enabled for normal usage.

All users automatically benefit from the upgrade (no manual change is needed, though it is possible to check the server version using the "debug:" URL).

Happy surfing! :cheers: