What The iPhone Can Teach Us About Mobile Web 2.0

One of the many plaudits you hear about the iPhone is how great the browsing experience is. Mobile Safari is quick, looks slick and incorporates some innovative gesture features all of which make for a great web experience for a mobile phone.

But here's the rub- it's a Web experience- it's all about Web-on-Mobile and not Mobile Web. Apple have billed it as 'The Internet on your phone' letting you access all the sites you visit on your PC. Unlike sites and services built for the Mobile Web, Web-on-Mobile doesn't take the Mobile Context into account, it's just regular websites which have no idea that you're visiting while on the move. When it comes to the Mobile Web, Context really is King and is one of the core aspects of what Mobile Web 2.0 is all about.

However the iPhone isn't just a Web-on-Mobile device, there is also a Mobile Web side to it which I think is far more exciting. We're starting to see more and more Web companies build iPhone specific versions of their sites which cater to the strengths of the iPhone experience and take the Mobile Context into consideration. All the services I use on my iPhone every day are Mobile Web services: I use Hahlo to keep up to date with Twitter, the iPhone version of Greader to read my feeds and the mobile versions of Gmail and Facebook for email and social-networking. All of these service are built for mobile and while I could have used the regular Web interface for all of them, the Mobile Web versions give me a far more compelling user-experience.

Web-on-Mobile isn't just lacking in Context, it also can't take advantage of the technology that Mobile Devices have that PCs don't.. These days mobiles have cameras that can produce still images and video, can produce location information both through GPS and cell towers and pretty soon will have even more technology such as compasses which will allow the phone to know exactly what the user is facing. These features alone can potentially be used as the basis for a whole new generation of Mobile Web services and we're already starting to see this being implemented with LBS services like Brightkite.

Users also have a wealth of data on their phones like contacts in their phonebook, bank and credit card details in their mobile wallet and a whole collection of Music and Videos that identify their tastes. When you combine this data with device technology gives developers a great set of tools to build fantastic Mobile Web services.

Now I'm not trying to discount Web-on-Mobile completely, there is a huge market for it ,especially right now when the Mobile Web isn't producing enough services. Devices like the iPhone, browsers like Opera Mini and Transcoders are all catering to that market. However we as an industry shouldn't be satisfied with Web-on-Mobile being the future of the Mobile Web, it would really limit the potential of what we can do in the future. For me that is what Mobile Web 2.0 is all about, making the first steps towards that future. Feature rich Mobile Web services that know which device is being used, knows where the user is standing, knows what the user likes and gives them a kick-ass user experience. That's what I want from Mobile Web 2.0 and from what I can see, we're definitely on the right track.


Tarek Abu-Esber
Blog - tarekesber.com
Moblog - Tarek snaps crap

Posted by Alfie