Mobile Web: Scattering edges between mobile minimalism and classical surfing.

2011 is brings series of new steps in portable technologies. Not only Internet access becomes available more and more widely, but means of accessing the Net are spreading in horrifying rate. If 2000’s begun with relatively expensive and hardly available means of communications to the Net, 2010’s and Chinese Industry have brought such means virtually to every house, and every hand.

Quality of services provided by those modern technologies often denies, but rate of interest increasingly rises, as people obtain ability to communicate with their loved ones regardlessly of their location. Cleverly used or abused… understanding of deepest human need and fear – in need of conversation – brings infinite fortune to producing minorities, revolutions to tired societies and dependency to each and every individual on this planet.

Yesterday, an average mobile, could only support WAP-sites, accessible thru slow ISP gate and requires establishing telephony connection. Every page, in order to be properly displayed, had to be formatted according to strictest specifications of lousy programmed internal browsers. Even e-mail was relatively slow and expensive to use in such environment. Either because of negligence, or as a failed try to enforce monopoly on developed applications, most phones had no networking support of any kind for 3rd party applications. And of course, common disease of mobile world, called Java, very hard to develop applications on, very memory-consuming to run, was the only solution to the growing needs of software developers.

Years have passed, changing the look of mobile industry, transforming it into more democratic form from one side, and more dependable and pushing on cellular networks, and hence, on end user budget, form from another.

Excluding Blackberry, PDA and HTC, in their early lives, since those were only available to people who really wanted it, we saw first open, to a degree, platform called Symbian. It was really a step forward, a way to develop Java-free applications, running natively on mobile phones. But as no good deed goes unpunished, there were license limitations, and framework itself made phones rather unstable, after installation of dozen programs. Never the less, it served its purpose really well, for that time. Developers awoke, brought up the tricks of old school computing, and adopted them for new, object-oriented world in series of applications for many purposes.

Appearance of touch-phone, 3G and 4G networks, and overall growth of market world-wide, forced mobile industry to seek for alternatives, to provide better end-user experience, which would guarantee their income for tomorrow. Unfortunately for consumers, in mobile world, giants decide what people need according to their limited understanding of the market. Disagreement in standards, and metacorporation wars, produced a series of concurrent technologies: Apple’s iOS – in many ways alike Blackberry (in terms of commerce), but targeting end-user experience; Microsoft Windows Mobile – keeping company’s strategy “Windows to every device”; Google Android – relatively new, quickly developed system, based on Linux, but still using gadgets & applets instead of native software; Nokia’s Maemo – Linux in soul; Samsung’s Bada – partially Linux based; OpenMoko only true Linux mobile and pan-corporation made Meego – Linux in everything.

In many ways, such strong tendency towards Linux as mobile operating system base, is explained by two common factors: its free, even for companies, to develop and adopt to their devices, and its open source, which means that every developer can bring newer technologies to the light, regardlessly of whether he works for you or not. After all, mobile world is not just production of phones and providing of connectivity, it is about software, giant platforms to sell applications for various needs. Finally, corporations understood that it is easier to make money on somebody else’s work, instead of putting their often limited resources into something that may end up as failure.

Rapid growth of concurrent systems, insured rapid growth of technological understanding between developers, and as result, increased overall level of quality for end products. A phone from previous years has really comprehensive touch recognition system, that is seems infinitely inferior to latest native Chinese phone, that is considered to be ultra low-end consumer product.

Opposite picture can be observed at hardware level. Moving most production bases to China made it possible to bring latest technologies to low end market, but also brought a series of drawbacks for mid/high end markets. Most obvious are shorter phone life on the average, very low quality speakers and inappropriate use of present hardware by OS.

Result is that progress is going the Chinese way, where quantity becomes property of quality, enforcing customer to stop making decisions and comparing products, but rather take first model he finds perfect this very moment. After all, when you have to choose a $1,000 phone, it is really a matter of hitting the spot, or empty barrel, but when you choose $100 phone, it’s really a matter of personal taste, since they are all alike.

Further reading:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone
• http://wiki.maemo.org/New_users
• http://www.bada.com/whatisbada/
• http://www.apple.com/ios/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29
• http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Why_Openmoko
• http://us.blackberry.com/developers/blackberry6/
• http://meego.com/about