…which I found in the blog of a german journalist living in London, writing about what happens if you have a great zest for life and are disabled at the same time.
I don’t want to describe it there. Just watch it (it’s a short movie), it’s really worth it. And think about that next time you are designing a web site.
I’ve just worked out how you could make a 3G iPhone yourself, even adding GPS support, and still get away with a lower cost than buying a regular iPhone. The solution:
JoikuSpot is still a bit limited — rather than just routing packets, it proxies HTTP traffic and doesn’t support anything else, so e.g. IMAP isn’t going to work for the time being. I hope that will get fixed soon. I tested JoikuSpot briefly for plain web traffic on my E65 and it seems to be working.
I’m not going to rush out and buy all those things now, I just find this situation curious.
John Crowcroft (a leading authority on communication systems, and a former lecturer of mine in Cambridge) has written a short informal paper on new directions in mobile communications. It is sub-titled “How to Learn to Stop Hating the Cellular Telephone Industry”, and more informally sub-titled “Rant about the cellphone industry’s failure of imagination”.
The paper draws analogies between the history of the internet (which has been absolutely astonishing over the last 30 years) and what the mobile phone industry could have done in the same time, had it taken the same sort of approach to innovation. Instead, the mobile telephone operators chose to lock down their systems, tightly control everything which goes in and out of them, and as a result have hardly experienced any innovation at all.
The key problem appears to be the fact that the telecoms companies have made a LOT of money from massively restricted services in the past, and they are continuing to do so today. If they open their systems and make it easy for third parties to provide services on top of them, they are probably going to lose some of that revenue in the short term. What they don’t realise (or do realise, but don’t want to face, for business or organisational reasons) is that they could make MUCH MORE money in the longer term by having an open system and providing great innovative services on top which people will happily pay for! The internet has proved that there are thousands of business models which are not only viable but actually extremely lucrative. You just need to be bold enough to take the risk of opening your systems to the competition.
Fortunately, there is a bit of movement — European mobile networks have at least made a few attempts at being reasonably open, and the US is gradually catching up too. But still it’s two steps forward and one back. Plenty of new devices (notably the iPhone) are still locked to one operator and don’t allow third-party software to be installed (unless you jailbreak it, of course). Eventually, we will probably get the same sort of innovation on mobile as we are getting on the internet, but it’s not going to be that quick.
Check Jon’s paper for a few business ideas, and then form a start-up. The more people try to make it happen, the more pressure there will be on the operators to open up, on the handset manufacturers to become compatible, etc.
Mobile internet usage is one of those areas which is hyped a lot, but it’s actually pretty hard to lay your hands on some real figures detailing the number of users. In this week’s NMA, there’s an article by Tim Barber of Continental Research which gives a few useful figures to quote.
If you add up the figures, you see that there are currently a total of 7.4 million mobile internet users in the UK, which corresponds to 12% of all mobile phone users. I think that’s a pretty impressive figure already — it shows that mobile internet use isn’t just a toy for a small number of geeks, but it’s actually fast en route to mainstream adoption. (I don’t have an up-to-date growth figure, but I do know that from 2006–2007 the number of page views from mobile devices went up by 16%, according to the Mobile Data Association.)
Speaking of geeks, the data from Continental Research breaks the population into four rough categories: whether or not they are interested in technology, and whether or not they are interested in style. Considering just the former criterion:
Spot something? A techie is 4 or 5 times more likely to use the internet on a mobile phone than a non-techie. However, the reality is that there are also 3 times as many non-techies as there are techies. This means they almost cancel out — right now, there are already plenty of people using mobile internet services even though they don’t care about gadgets and technology toys.
This is pretty good news: it shows that the general population has a genuine need which mobile internet access can address. It’s not just a toy, and we don’t simply use it just because we can. It’s actually something which can make our lives better.
Viewed in terms of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, right now, the mobile web and mobile internet are stepping out of the Trough of Disillusionment (into which they fell with the failure of WAP to match expectations) onto the Slope of Enlightenment.
I think this calls for a graph.
I just got back from a garden centre, where I had ventured on the exciting mission of getting some indoor potted plants to make our office nicer. So there I was, amidst a cloud of greenery, not having the foggiest clue what plants may be suitable for our office space (with good artifical light but not much natural light, and more importantly, with somebody taking care of them whose track record with plants hasn’t exactly been glamorous).
I couldn’t spot any shop assistants nearby whom I could quiz. There were little labels on the pots which detailed the required conditions, but I wasn’t sure I could believe them — they looked very generic, most were very similar, and sometimes two pots with plants of the same species had different labels, contradicting each other. They looked very much as though they had just been distributed willy-nilly without any regard for the actual needs of the plant.
Enter the mobile web. Fortunately many of the plants were labelled with the name of their species (except for those which were helpfully labelled “foliage plant”), and I had my phone with me. Casting those names into Wikipedia on my mobile quickly gave me a good idea which plants were likely to survive my “care”. Now the mobile web is happy because it has solved somebody’s problem; the garden centre is happy because they were able to sell me plants without even needing to employ a shop assistant; and I’m happy because Ept Computing is now a nicer place to work. We’ve even got, believe it or not, a corporate watering can. (Somehow this reminds me of Douglas Adams and towels.)
It’s nice to practise what you preach and show that mobile web access really is useful in everyday life.
Over the Christmas holidays I was reading Joel on Software, the book summarising some of the most interesting material from Joel Spolsky’s blog. (The book is worth reading, although I did find it quite a shame that it was pretty much verbatim the blog contents pressed on paper for easier reading. It would have been nicer if the writing style had been changed from the slightly rambling, disconnected style of blogs to a more coherent style expected from a book. But the stuff Joel talks about is definitely worth reading for software engineers, in whatever form.)
The article which I found most interesting is his “Strategy Letter V” (page 281), which is also available on the web. It explains why, in his opinion, so many large companies are investing in open source software.
On the surface, open source seems a strange model for a business — why should a company spend a lot of time and money developing software, and then simply give it away? The claim that they have suddenly given up on capitalism isn’t exactly convincing. The claim that it’s cheaper from them to get free code contributions from teenagers than to write it themselves… not so sure about that one either.
Joel gives the first answer which I actually find convincing. He explains open source investment in economic terms, through so-called complements. For example, flights to Venice and accomodation in Venice are complements of each other: customers need both in order to get a holiday in Venice, but they are sold by completely different companies. And if flights to Venice get cheaper, more people want to go there, so there is higher demand on accomodation, so prices of hotel rooms in Venice go up. And vice versa. This economic effect of complements has been observed in many different markets.
So, if A and B are complements of each other, and the price of A goes down, then the price of B will go up. So, if you are a company selling B, and you are clever, you will try to push the price of A down as far as possible, even commodify it. That way, you can sell B for a higher price and you’ll be better off.
And now if you look around who is investing in open source software, you’ll notice that often the software released in this free manner is actually a complement of what that company is trying to sell. For instance:
Once you think about it this way, it’s amazing how the economics begin to make sense!
Looking back at 2007, I can’t help but think that the iPhone was probably the most important and influential technology phenomenon of the year. It’s been talked about so much that I’m actually starting to get sick of it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has had a significant impact, particularly on the way the mobile web works.
One of the most striking developments that ensued are the moves by several popular web sites to provide versions of their offering which are specifically tailored to people visiting their site from an iPhone. Amongst others, I found:
(Most of these sites show their iPhone look only to web browsers which identify themselves as Safari Mobile. To test them in a desktop web browser, see this article.)
iPhone specific development is fashionable, it seems. Some of those sites actually borrow and incorporate iPhone design elements (such as the style of lists and tabs, animation and icons), further blurring the distinction between web sites and applications. A List Apart, a widely respected resource for web developers, has even published a long article on how to develop iPhone-specific web sites (Part I, Part II). Apple themselves also offer in-depth information. iPhoneApplicationList.com maintains an extensive list of iPhone-optimised web applications.
Christopher Schmitt argues that making websites accessible for people with disabilities would expand a website’s reach far more than making an iPhone-specific site does. And Scott Gilbertson of WIRED thinks that the current situation is very similar to the old days when people were designing web sites specifically for Internet Explorer 4 (which was ahead of Netscape at the time). Jeff Croft suggests the opposite, saying that device-specific application development is going to happen anyway, and it doesn’t really matter whether it uses web technologies or not.
iPhone market share
What is the market share of iPhone internet browsing actually like? Hard to say, because it depends so much on what you measure. In terms of sold devices, the iPhone is performing strongly, but it is still a small proportion of the overall handset market. There are at least 100 million mobile devices with modern browsers (Opera Mobile, Nokia’s S60 browser, both of which are capable of displaying standard desktop web pages) compared to an estimated 2 million iPhones. Phones with WAP/XHTML browsers or adaptation browsers (such as Opera Mini) are a lot more numerous still. So in terms of the number of devices, writing iPhone-specific sites (as opposed to Opera-specific sites, for instance) really doesn’t make much sense.
Hitslink/Net Applications’ operating system statistics show that in December 2007, iPhone and iPod Touch users accounted for 0.14% of web page views, more than all other mobile platforms put together (Windows Mobile: 0.06%, S60: 0.02%). The Register reported this too. However, Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, points out that these figures are misleading:
Hitslink produced this report by using data from their analytics customers. These people operate HTML/PC websites. They say: “You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on”.
The 300 million or so mobile phone browser users (say 50 million S60) can’t or don’t browse HTML sites. They browse mobile friendly sites (WAP or XHTML or iMode) which will not have this HTML code in.
Considering that organizations like Bango, Admob, Peperonity, Vodafone report mobile browser traffic in the billions of pages per day, most of thse being S40 or S60 its clear that by ignoring non-HTML sites these stats are misleading and mistaken.
– Ray Anderson, in an email to Mobile Monday London mailing list, 5 Dec 2007
In other words, all that Hitslink’s statistics say is that iPhone users are more likely to visit more desktop web sites, but it doesn’t say anything at all about usage of sites which are specifically designed for mobile use. The conclusion I draw from this is that an iPhone user is much more likely to visit desktop sites than Windows Mobile or S60 users, and therefore non-iPhone users either mostly use sites designed for mobile, or don’t use the web much at all. This may have a variety of reasons — due to its large screen, desktop web sites are more usable on the iPhone than they are on devices with smaller screens; Safari Mobile has pretty neat zooming capabilities; and maybe iPhone users simply approach the device with a more web-oriented attitude, because after all it is more of an internet tablet than a phone.
If iPhone users actually prefer desktop-style websites, because they work quite nicely on the large screen, it really doesn’t make much sense to design a specific iPhone version of a site. On the other hand, if it’s that increased usability of the iPhone web experience which drives web usage per person to be many times higher than on S60 and Windows Mobile devices… then there’s a very strong case in favour of designing device-specific sites.
Is iPhone-specific design just a case of companies wanting to look cool by having an iPhone-optimised site and jumping on the bandwagon? Is this just a fashion which will go away again as quickly as it came? Or do such companies actually derive significant benefits from iPhone users? I’d be interested to hear your comments.
There are a number of web sites out there which provide specifically optimised versions for the iPhone. I was curious to test them (and to look at their source code to see what they are doing), but don’t have an iPhone myself. Many sites will only give a visitor the iPhone version of their site if the web browser identifies itself as Safari Mobile. How do you get it?
The solution is the “user agent” — a string sent by the web browser to the server as part of every request. It contains the name and version of the browser software you are using, the operating system, and a few other bits and pieces. It’s a very useful piece of information to website administrators, who can use it to compile anonymous statistics about the people who visit their site.
Many people consider it to be bad practice to serve different versions of a site depending on the user agent, but it happens often enough anyway. And that’s exactly what is going on here. Fortunately there are tools which will let you modify the user agent, so you can see what you would get if you were using some other software. This is sometimes called “masquerading” as another browser. The technique described here is for Firefox, but it’s possible to do the same thing with other browsers too.
Download the User Agent Switcher add-on for Firefox, and restart Firefox. In the menu, go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options. Add a new user agent, with description “iPhone”, and the following entry in the user agent field:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3
The remaining fields (app version etc.) can stay empty. Now you can click Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> iPhone, and your browser instantly “becomes” an iPhone. If the site uses features which are not available in Firefox, it will not render correctly, but at least the site should serve you the same content as it would do to an iPhone. (The user agent above is taken from a real iPhone; there are probably many others which work too, but that one has worked for me.)
One big caveat: you shouldn’t really be doing this! Use it only briefly for testing a site, then reset the user agent to the Firefox default. Otherwise you’ll end up sending the iPhone user agent to all other web sites you visit too, and that isn’t good for anybody. You may up being locked out of certain web sites or getting the wrong version, and administrators of web sites will hate you because you mess up their statistics.
So please, please reset the user agent to the default when you’ve finished testing.
As part of the re-launch of Ept Computing’s website I’ve also published a white paper on user satisfaction on the mobile web. Some of it consists of observations which I’ve previously blogged about, now pulled together and presented in a more coherent and structured manner. I’ve structured it according to some interesting findings from the Online Publishers’ Association. They surveyed mobile web users and found that their main sources of dissatisfaction with the mobile web were:
While I’m not quite sure what they mean with “user friendliness” — it’s a kind of compound term for all sorts of factors which contribute towards the user experience — the other two, load time and navigation, are very clear areas which need to be addressed if the mobile web wants to move forward.
Site load time is a tricky problem to address, because slowness is mainly due to packet round-trip times on mobile data services. I see Ajax and Flash to be the most promising approaches to beat the network latency — i.e. transferring more data up front in order to make the site more responsive once it’s loaded. Site navigation is mainly a question of information architects figuring out how to present information most effectively on a mobile, and there are already some very good examples of good mobile navigation design on the net.
If you’re interested, you can download the white paper (PDF, 124 kB). Here’s the abstract:
The use of internet and web services on mobile devices is expected to revolutionise our attitude to information and communication in the near future. However, in order to attract mainstream adoption, the mobile web must overcome some fundamental user experience problems. In this white paper we approach the user experience from a technical point of view, explaining reasons for deficiencies of the current approaches, and introduce some technical means for improving the user experience.
The mobile web is talked about a lot by people who have a vested interest in the mobile web becoming popular. The frequently-cited arguments in favour of web usage on mobile phones sound pretty convincing until you realise that most of those people talking so passionately about it have invested in the mobile web, and therefore may be stating their wishful thinking rather than an observed reality. (I am, unfortunately, no exception, being a mobile web developer myself.)
Mobile internet use has been hyped a lot — WAP has been around since the late nineties, and many people originally speculated on it being a huge success. Well, it never was in most parts of the world. It’s quite understandable that observers are now rather more cautious when it is announced that the mobile web is finally here, and that it is about to engulf the mainstream consumer.
In such an environment it is refreshing to hear the opinion of a neutral organisation who simply observes what is going on in the minds of consumers worldwide. Trendwatching.com produces well researched monthly briefings on the latest consumer trends worldwide. I have been following them for a while, wondering when the time would come that they would announce the mobile web as a major consumer trend. And now, in December 2007, the time has arrived. They announce in their predictions for 8 important consumer trends in 2008 (PDF):
“Five years ago, we introduced ONLINE OXYGEN as the engine behind all this excitement: control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen. [...] If there’s one device that’s going to introduce another few hundred million people to the online world, it’s the phone. And yes, initiatives like Google’s Android and ‘their bidding on the 700MHz band’ and WiMax and so on are definitely going to speed things up. [...] don’t count on consumers’ insatiable demand to be online 24/7 to remain unmet forever.”
– Trendwatching.com, “Online Oxygen”
Although still a bit cautious in their wording, and emphasising that it won’t happen overnight, the trendwatchers have confirmed that the mobile web is not just a bubble. The signs are set for internet access anywhere, at any time, on almost any device, and it’s looking as though we won’t be able to imagine a world without it in a reasonably small number of years’ time.
But what is all that online access to be used for? E-commerce and social networking, say the trendwatchers. Social networking is a bit difficult to grasp, I think; it’s another one of those areas with a lot of hype and not necessarily much substance. E-commerce is a very important reality though, as yesterday’s article from Computing points out (UK online sales have risen by 29% since last year, reaching £130bn). And Trendwatching.com are convinced that this trend is going to continue:
“Sometimes, the Next Big Thing can be right under your nose. Consider the online riches to be reaped in 2008 from… ecommerce! Sure, it’s been around for years and years, but prepare for a forceful ’sequel’. After all, never before have so many consumers been willing to overcome security threats, still shockingly bad (or boring) design, and delivery screwups. In other words, 2008 could be a goldmine for smart e-tailers, who, if they get their act together, could make billions and billions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, kroner, lira and rand that are impatiently waiting to be spent by web-savvy consumers around the world.
So in 2008, spend blood, sweat and tears on improving your ecommerce presence; the pay-off will be immediate, and far more substantial than investing in Web 2.0 me-toos!”
– Trendwatching.com, “Online Oxygen”
Consider that this market research organisation spends most of their time talking about brand psychology, status symbols, and the purchasing habits of particular sections of society. They are not technology-oriented in the least. And nevertheless they are announcing the coming of the ubiquitous internet, and its huge value for commerce. For me, this announcement marks the transition of the mobile web from hype to reality.
Of course, there are still a lot of problems to overcome — the top three are probably user experience, data traffic pricing, and handset market fragmentation. But if the consumer demand is there, these problems can all be sorted out. People are figuring out how to design engaging and usable mobile web sites and applications; flat rate data plans are becoming more common (in the UK at least); and fragmentation will mean that developing for the mobile web is a bit more expensive than it could be if everybody stuck to a standard, but it’s still an entirely surmountable issue.
With the economic force of e-commerce retailers pushing technology ahead, I am rather optimistic towards the mobile web.