hello world! the mobile web
Posted by Dan Eastwell
i'm writing this from my phone-an instrument with a numeric keypad and a joystick suited to a hamster. my connection takes me back to 1996. i can read my gmail, but can't send to flickr. twitter doesn't want to know either through opera mini or text. it's baby steps at the moment, and even with a phone only a year old, high technological barriers.
An update
I'm writing this now from a laptop, rather than from a phone, so my typing rate has gone up by a factor of about ten.
It's great now that we can add content to the web from a mobile device. Having said that, it's still a painfully slow process. Speedier input devices such as stylus input with character recognition and small-scale keyboards will speed up the process, but it's still at the snippets stage.
3G connections may make connection speeds faster, but currently, it's a tooth-pullingly painful process to add content.
Usability barriers
The mobile web is probably just past the 'early-adoption' stage, but there still are technological barriers to those with older phones, and without the technological know-how to be able to use web internet services independently of the limited content of service providers' portals.
For example, to get to send images to flickr, I need my own flickr email address, which I can't access with gmail using opera mini. Google's mobile app will read, but not send from my current mobile phone
I'm not knocking all the decent developers who have put effort to getting to this stage, and it's great they have. But the Mobile Web is nowhere near yet where the hype machine has put it, but that level of speed and sophistication, I see as only being a matter of time.
I mobile Flickr using the ShoZu java app (www.shozu.com) - it uploads to a whole host of media sites including YouTube.
It’s not so good if you’ve had a couple of pints, however. Thanks to the joy of RSS - what goes on the Internet tends to STAY on the Internet.
Rite, iam a university of ulster student , and for a part of an assignment i must find out how to write ” hello world” on web and send it to a mobile device of my tutor. If someone with brains could help me here it would b well appreciated!!!!