Surfs Up!....naaah not just yet!

I eventually succumbed to it. The data charges (WAP, GPRS) scared me away at first but once the apprehension had faded slightly I decided to take a leap of faith and try what I would normally do on my laptop on my phone.
I started with browsing my favourite sites. Facebook,eBay, Newgrounds, MySpace ….Surfing the Internet from a mobile phone always seemed to me to be a peculiar user experience. Screens are too small to capture the amount of data normally included (y’know the important things such as group photo’s I may be tagged in on facebook!).Speeds are slow compared to broadband and a lack of unique content for mobile has often resulted in really ugly WAP pages (those rendered for PC screens just don’t sit well on small screens) .No pictures, just text. Now what’s the point in that!? The overall feel I got from this experience is simply that Web surfing should be left to big boys aka the big screen computers. Sounds like the prehistoric days of web pages…..remember those early pages that are now worse than the output from beginner level students on web authoring classes! Time and technology moves on and so does our tolerance of what is interesting and useful.
When people think of the internet now they think, high speed, broadband, information appearing before our eyes within millisecond’s of a simple ‘click’.
They don’t think loading-loading–loading………. for around a minute until some pathetic excuse for a web page appears on their screens.

Today, what people see on PC full screen browsers and what appears on people’s tiny mobile screens are poles apart. The user expectations, motivations and circumstances are entirely different. So should be the end product.
You see, people who browse on-the-move have different uses, needs and preferences for accessing the net on their mobiles. Tailor-made content for your mobile is the key to driving these users to addictively use the Internet on their mobiles as much as they do on their computers. Not too much, just snappy bits of useful relevant data that we need on the go and more importantly delivered to the user immediately .Snappy answers, quick guides rendered in small graphics. No elaborate designs needed just clarity and speed.
The heavens have already answered this call in the States where mobile network Helio is already selling phones with pre-loaded MySpace features. MySpace have treated the consumer to tailor made applications to view friend’s profiles, and apparently MySpace hope to, by the end of 2007 have all handsets preinstalled with the MySpace application. Now that’s what I’m talking bout’.

Reports show that an average 29 percent of European Internet users access the Web on mobile devices. This includes users in Germany (34 percent); Italy (34 percent); France (28 percent); Spain (26 percent); and the U.K. (24 percent). In the U.S., 19 percent of Internet users access the Internet on cell phones and other mobile devices. Across all six countries, mobile Web users are predominantly male (55 percent). comScore Networks, 2006.These stats prove that yes , there is indeed a mobile market out there for use of the Internet ,but they also prove that there’s also plenty of room for this market to grow provided it is given the means to!Lack of high bandwidth 3G network is the convenient excuse to why mobile Internet usage hasn't picked up yet, but it is the user experience, the content and applications that haven't convinced users of their mobile value. There are tremendous opportunities for relevant applications initiated over Internet mobile networks, but these should be defined clearly to the mobile user and rendered appropriately. Simply taking Internet applications and trying to run them on mobile phones does not work and that’s the situation today.
I mean what’s the point in having bebo on my mobile if I can’t l can’t browse through friends of friends photo albums, see peoples flash box’s ,or check out my celebrity look-a-likes!?
Let’s get relevant mobile browsing based applications in front of the user. Google maps, quick answers, searches, location based info, driving directions, ticket purchases and most importantly social networking sites are what the busy mobile user wants.
These days’ people are expecting more and more from their mobile phone. Their time is spent increasingly in transit and their mobile phone is supposed to be their trusty companion to see them through these time, it wouldn’t want to be letting them down!