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One of my favorite conferences last year, the MEX Mobile User Experience Conference, has published its agenda for this years’ conference on May 27-28 in London. Check the agenda and speaker list for full details.

A special discount is offered to mTrends readers (check details at the bottom of this post).

The conference helps executives to gain a deeper understand of customer behaviour and translate that knowledge into better mobile products. The key objective is raising awareness of user experience issues as a strategic priority for everyone in the value chain, encouraging the mobile business to put consumer needs at the heart of the industry.

It is a very different style of conference. Each event is researched and developed by a team with a passion for mobile and unique insight drawn from years of industry experience. Corporate pitches are outlawed, everyone plays a role in setting the agenda and we go to extraordinary lengths to provide the highest standards of service.

This years’ conference programme is based around a 10 point Manifesto (download pdf here) for enhancing the mobile user experience. Each of the 10 Manifesto statements is addressed through a diverse range of presentations, panel discussions and collaborative breakout groups.

Topics include…

1. Content itself will be the interface of the future
2. Handsets are no longer just for the hand
3. Fragmentation is the enemy of innovation
4. Fashion is a stronger motivator than functionality
5. The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience
6. Search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment
7. Intelligent contact lists are the future centres of the user interface
8. Mobile payments herald the next generational shift
9. Users as individuals: uniquely complex and contradictory
10. The potential of smart voice

Some of the speakers include:

On the opening night there is also a reception to announce the Winners of the 2008 MEX Design Competition. Check it out, some really great stuff out there! If you design interfaces and have a compelling idea or product to delight customers and enhance the mobile user experience, you can still participate, the deadline for entries is 23:00 GMT, Friday, 2nd May 2008.

MEX is now less than 5 weeks away and, as with all previous MEX events, the organizers target to sell out well in advance on the conference date. If you’ve not yet reserved your place at the event, now is the time to do so - passes are selling out fast.

mTrends readers can get a 10% discount on a conference attendance pass (priced at GBP 1499). Go to the registration form and enter ‘MM24′ in the ‘partner code’ box on the registration form.

Hope to see you there!

Flying in directly from CTIA Las Vegas to London, I’ll be talking at the Over The Air event on April 4 at Imperial College.

Organised by BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester and Vodafone’s Daniel Appelquist and backed by a lot of industry leading companies, Over The Air is bringing together developers, designers, hackers and entrepreneurs to explore the potential of wireless and mobile devices/applications.

Check the complete list of speakers and schedule here, it’s really impressive and looks very promising. Kudos to Daniel and Ian & team for making this happen, really looking forward to this event.

Expect to see a bunch of sessions as diverse as user experience design as well as some masterclasses/workshops from handset and software companies, including Apple (iPhone), Google (Android), Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe and Yahoo!

Head on over to the Over The Air blog for all the details and how to register…

This is one of a series of guest articles by Marek Pawlowski, Editorial Director at PMN and founder of the MEX conference, examining the key mobile user experience issues facing the telecoms industry in 2008. These themes are highlighted in PMN’s 2008 MEX Manifesto and will be at the heart of the agenda for the 4th annual MEX conference in London on 27th - 28th May 2008.

Mobile phones were traditionally designed with the comfort of the ear in mind. The original Motorola flips, the Nokia ‘banana phone’ and the numerous chunky ‘bricks’ of the 1990s were all built primarily around the need for a device which could be held to the face for extended periods of time. If we look at how the market has evolved today, the design requirements are very different because phones are as much about visual activites like texting, email, photos and web pages as they are about the traditional function of voice.

Consider the ratio of screen size verus the overall ‘face’ area of the device. Over time, displays have come to dominate the main interaction surface of the mobile phone. If you could track this ratio over the lifetime of the mobile industry, it would show a steadily increasing trend, starting with the single line ‘dot matrix’ displays of the 1980s and rising through to the massive screens of the iPhone, Prada phone, Viewty and HTC Touch.

The iPhone and its touchscreen have ushered in a boom for the UI design industry. Faced with Apple as a new competitor, rival handset manufacturers are recruiting UI experts as never before. Spurred in to action by the fear of being left behind, management teams throughout the device business are now mandating a selection of touchscreen products in their portfolio. iPhone sales volumes may still be less than a single digit percentage of the market, but there is no doubting the device has established a new design benchmark.

This sudden willingness to embrace the touchscreen is providing UI designers with more scope than ever before to create flexible interaction layers which adapt to provide the best interface method for individual applications.

What we are seeing is the digitisation of the man machine interaction (MMI) layer and the consequences will be profound.

The iPhone was the first device brave enough to implement the MMI entirely in software. In doing so, Apple prompted the industry to consider what could be achieved once it was freed from having to interact with every application through the same three or four hardware buttons.

The manufacturers with an established and consistent DNA for hardware-based MMI are now pondering how they can maintain the value of their existing investment in MMI consistency and still introduce new innovations with the same ‘wow’ factor as the Apple UI. It’s a very tough question and one that is currently keeping a huge number of UI designers and consultants in well paid work!

However, while UI teams around the world are getting to grips with this major strategic issue, I would like to sound two notes of warning.

Firstly, a funky new UI is never the answer to all your user experience problems - there’s no silver bullet. Any new UI or MMI innovations must be part of an overall commitment to user experience. This is the most fundamental principle of everything we do with our MEX research and consultancy work - it is also the main theme of our 2008 MEX conference and the MEX Design Competition.

User experience is not a set of technologies or a layer within the product design process: it is about having a customer-centred approach at the heart of everything you do, from marketing strategy to after-sales support.

You need only spend a couple of hours with the a device like the HTC Touch to recognise that, however attractive the top layer of the UI, the overall user experience will be fatally flawed if you don’t invest in the deep level of integration required to make a new interaction methodology really work.

Secondly, the priorities of interaction design are about to change again. Handsets will no longer just be for the hand (this is one of 10 key Manifesto statements for the 2008 MEX conference).

The mobile phone started as a device for the ear and has since become a device that is also for the eye. In both of these scenarios, the consistent factor is that the phone remains cradled in the palm of the hand - in 30 years of mobile handset design, this has been one of the few constants.

Finally, that is starting to change. Driven by applications like mapping, music, video and tele-conferencing, the handset is increasingly migrating from our palms and finding a new place in the environment around us.

We are starting to see phones attached to the car dashboard or pumping out music from the bookshelf of a teenager’s bedroom. They are being propped up on tables so kids can watch videos on holiday and plugged in to TVs to drive photo slideshows.

Over time, the average interaction distance between the users and their phones will increase significantly from the few centimetres we see today. Interaction designers can no longer take it for granted that the user will be holding the device in the their hand, with their face close to the screen.

This has big implications for the design of software, the choice of input method, the use of haptics and the role of accessories to extend the experience.

As an example, I have my Nokia N95 mounted on the dashboard of the car. It can provide GPS-enabled mapping, speakerphone and even play my music tracks through the car audio system. However, many of these features are simply too difficult to use unless I’m actually holding the device in my hand.

The keys are too small to press accurately while driving, so searching for an address in the mapping application is impossible unless you are parked. Similarly, I am unable to find the song I want in my music library or build a new playlist. The font size on-screen is also difficult to read at that distance. At night, when the dashboard of the car dims to make it easier to see the road, the handset continues to blaze at full brightness.

This is not meant to be a criticism of the N95 in particular, but rather an illustration of how the new capabilities of mobile phones are enabling out-of-hand applications while the user interaction model is still centred on in-hand scenarios.

There are all sorts of technologies emerging which could improve this experience. Voice recognition is getting better all the time (e.g. Nuance’s ’speak-to-search’ application). Nokia is implementing touchscreen support in Series 60, allowing for more flexible, adaptive UI design. Start-ups like Zeemote have even developed Bluetooth remote controls, allowing you to interact with your mobile phone at a distance (its initial focus is on handheld gaming).

Microvision, with a long-history in new display technologies, is one of several companies which has created a ‘pico’ projector using laser technology to beam videos and photos on to remote surfaces. Along with others, Microvision has also developed wearable glasses which display the screen as a tiny image in front of the eye which, because of its proximity, appears equivalent to a large home cinema screen.

For music, more and more handset manufacturers and third parties are offering speaker systems which turn mobile phones into compelling audio systems. One of the most attractive I’ve seen is the Bowers and Wilkins iPhone speaker dock designed by Native (Thomas Kleist, Director of UI Design at Native, is one of our speakers at the 2008 MEX Conference on 27th - 28th May in London). It transforms the iPhone from a personal media player into a room-filling audio experience that puts the mobile phone at the heart of the environment.

The industry faces a real and complex challenge over the next few years. On the one hand, device manufacturers must grapple with the immediate competitive implications of the iPhone and the growth in touchscreen devices. On the other, companies throughout the industry are seeking to expand the role of the phone into every area of our daily lives, including many scenarios where the handset will actually no longer be held in our hands.

We’ll be tackling these issues from several angles at MEX, the 4th annual PMN Mobile User Experience conference, in London on 27th - 28th May 2008. ‘Handsets are no longer just for the hand‘ is one of the 10 key statements on our MEX Manifesto and will be addressed by Steve Chambers, President of Mobile and Consumer Services at Nuance. He will give a presentation to provoke and inspire a series of breakout discussions, where 100 leading thinkers from across the mobile business will work together to explore a number of questions relating to this topic.

Thomas Kleist, Director of UI Design at Native, will speak on ‘Content itself is the new interface‘. Also addressing this topic will be Ocean Observations, before we open the session to a conference-wide debate.

Join the debate on our blog before the MEX conference opens

Can we further refine the standard twelve key monobloc design to give us greater flexibility to support these functions? How much flexibility do we have in software platforms to support these different usage methods? At what stage in the design process do we focus on particular user requirements and build them in to the hardware specification? Post your comments using the link below…

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/ 

2007 was a very prosperous and exciting year for mobile technology in general, still we’re just at the beginning of a new era of more magic to come in the mobile and web convergent area’s. So, traditionally I’m writing down 10 Mobile Trends for the coming year, always a good personal excercise how close one is predicting mobile market trends and an indicator of what I think will matter in 2008.

Read my Mobile and Wireless Trends for 2007 and check for yourself my gut feeling on what happened yet and what is still to come. It seems very obvious and easy but predicting trends can be tricky, just try it for yourself! Check also my del.icio.us for some interesting predictions from other technology blogs I bookmarked during holidays. One of my favorite readings during holidays is still Carlo Longino’s and Russell Buckley’s yearly predictions at Mobhappy. Do check them out!

So here are my Mobile and Wireless Trends for 2008:

1. Google’s Android and the Open Handset Alliance will definately take off in 2008. While the iPhone is doing probably the best job embracing mobile and web convergence, the Apple OS is still a closed system and used by a rather small market segment of users. Nokia’s Nseries - though all remarkeable devices - didn’t produce any breakthrough Symbian OS changes last year and is still too buggy to go mass-market - I don’t see my sister or father perform a device software update; which leaves the opportunity for Google and the Open Handset Alliance to get the new Linux-based operating system Android on several cutting-edge smartphones before year-end. Mobile OS, a truely competitive space in 2008!
   
2. The Rise of the Mobile Social Networks. M:Metrics released some promising data mid-2007 on the rise of the Mobile Social Networks. With the big social media networks all going mobile in 2007 (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Bebo, …), this trend will continue to rise in 2008, sustained by more flat rate introductions on different markets.
   
3. Apple will be seriously attacked by the music industry on its own, once disruptive, iTunes business model. 2008 will be the year of further downfall of DRM and the raise of watermarked audio-files. With Sony BMG planning to drop DRM - the last of the Big Four record labels with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Music, to throw in the towel on digital rights management. The end of DRM might embolden a host of new, online download venues initiated by the Big Four in its searches for a successful digital strategy. Note also the rise of new business models (!) giving away DRM-free, ad-supported music downloads, like the recently founded Rcrd Lbl by Peter Rojas. Read my DRM Free at Last! for a recent overview and links to previous posts on this topic.
4. Telefonica will introduce the 3G iPhone. To be announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February?
5. The return of the Location-Based Services. Since Nokia introduced the Nseries N95 with built in GPS, Location-Based Services are becoming exciting again. A new wave of mobile services and applications build on the location of the user (cell-ID and/or GPS) will see the light this year, driven by the open Google Maps API and flickr’s geotagged photo function. Read also my early 2005 coverage on the formerly known MoSoSos.
6. First iPhone competitors coming to market. Nokia will introduce a serious competitor for the iPhone. It has the hardware manufacturing intelligence and knowledge to come up with its own multi-touch screen interface. Biggest challenge for Nokia (and other manufacturers) will be to keep the OS user-experience as simple as the iPhone. Expect some great innovating devices from HTC too in 2008! (checkout the HTC Touch Dual).
7. Mobile Video Blogging starting to taking off. Though still to be used by early adopters, mobile video blogging tools such as Kyte.tv mobile are already doing a great job with Floobs and KaZiVu also looking very promising (both still in beta), not to forget about YouTube Mobile. All eyes will be on Seesmic however that has the right start-up vibe - instigated daily by its impressive experienced shareholders (and web 2.0 icons) and its very active beta-testers community. Imagining Seesmic to be used on your mobile phone is an easy one, the challenges for Seesmic are to bypass the complex technical issues and delivery of its great idea.
8. Mobile search, as already predicted last year will continue to be one of the most important and most used mobile applications. I keep this one in my list adding that some new players might disrupt the big Search market players, not having figured out the real mobile search issues such as accuracy, context, relevance, latency and the correct display of local and niche results.
9. PRM (Personal Rights Management) and Privacy policies and procedures will be high on the agenda for every entreprise and conscious connected individuals. Already talk of the connected crowds at LeWeb3, opening the Social Graphs might appear cool in your social media community but has to be done right! As a starter, check out Dataportability.org and watch Robert Scoble explaining his recent portability issues with Facebook.
10. Twitter and the breakthrough of the ultimate Mobile Presence Tool. Yes, Twitter is the utlimate mobile presence tool, since it’s the easiest to use (through SMS and mobile web access), and most accurate to stay connected at any time from anywhere… Jaiku has a definately a richer client but Twitter is the most easily integrated into most of your social networks, checkout MoodBlast that can simultaneously update multiple chat clients and web services presence tools. 2008 will also see the rise of lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, surprisingly simple on the web and looks great on your mobile phone.

Some of the downers of 2007:

- the sudden death of great blogger Marc Orchant - my deepest sympathies to Marc’s family.

- the whole blognation’s saga - one nation, many bugs…
- and just recently Om Malik’s heart attack - wish him strength, get well soon, Om!

Definately an urge for all bloggers not to forget about their daily excercise, no less!

I wish all my readers a great and magic 2008!

One of my favorite startups Kyte just announced it has raised $15 million in a second round of funding. The round was led by Telefónica, the world’s fourth largest global telecommunications firm, with Nokia Growth Partners, the global private equity and venture capital management arm of Nokia, and DoCoMo Capital, Inc., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo, Inc., the leading mobile communication company based in Japan, also participating. Other investors in this round include Swisscom, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurveston.

Kyte presented an impressive live demo at the Mobile Launchpad at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October recently.

The interesting news for me is not the $15M, which seems rather small for a Series B in this area but the distribution channel opportunities Kyte.tv opens through this deal, as Robert Scoble mentioned earlier:

“Telefónica has 230 million users. DoCoMo has 52 million. Nokia has 39% of the cell phone market share. If the Kyte player is embedded on these three it brings a HUGE audience to Kyte.”

As a true promotor of his own technology, CEO Daniel Graf announced the news on a live video conference on Kyte.

If you haven’t tried Kyte Mobile, it’s definately worthwhile you start doing so. It’s one of the only apps I know with such a cool user experience, integrating live audio and video chat interaction with other social media. Congrats to Daniel and the Kyte team!

Really looking forward how Kyte will develop the coming months and launch new features.

Here’s some thoughts and a short wrapup of the Mobile 2.0 event I helped to organize in San Francisco. It was the second time this event took place, organised last year by Mike, Daniel, Gregory and Peter. For this years’ event, they asked me to join the team and I’m really glad I took the decision to participate, I truly believe this is only the start of more interestig things to come produced by this quintet

The event was really great! Being part of the organizers committee and having a good view of events happening around the globe, this is a really exceptional event, connecting the transitioning and convergent worlds of web and mobile; exceptional because some of the best heads in mobile are spending a day together discussing and exploring the opportunities and threats of what we call the next generation mobile services. Unique since it brings together both a local (Silicon Valley) and a European crowd, something essential in todays’ global economy. Innovation is happening everywhere, the world is flat.

Understanding the potential of the mobile device as a connector of objects and people in the near future is a must and I think this event is the best I have seen in this area, covering essential topics such as Social Media, User Experience, Usability and Design, Disruption, Emerging Technologies, New Business Models brought by thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists.

I was not alone with my thoughts since Tomi T. Ahonen send us this text note during the event: “Wow, this room really holds probably more of the true influencers of the actual future of mobile than any other event I have ever attended. Impressive!”

And what about these notes from Oliver Starr, who was live blogging for Blognation during the conference:

There’s one last disruption I’d like to mention and it might be the most sublime disruption of them all. The power that will be realized by the 250 plus individuals that took that time and invested the money to spend a day deep in discussion about the next generation of mobile. The cumulative increase in knowledge realized by the attendees at this event will spread out into the world in waves. Perhaps some will be small ripples, a few rolling whitecaps, but combined, we are looking at a tidal wave of new knowledge, shared ideas, and new alliances that have the power to change the world we live in profound ways.

Knowledge is not power. Knowledge wielded effectively is power. As I look around the room as we reach the waning moments of the 2007 Mobile 2.0 Conference, I can’t help but wonder if the people in this room realize the incredible, explosive potential that each of them now has should they apply in any measure the intelligence they’ve gained in the ten hours spent here today.

I specifically like the size of the event, crowded with some 250 attendees, speakers and press yet small enough to have a chat and connect with nearly everybody present.

Here’s a set of resources from the event I could find of as of now. You can track the ongoing discussions using Google Blog Search tagged “Mobile 2.0“.
Richard MacManus has been LIVE blogging the event (incredible how fast he writes!):

• Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media & Business Opportunities
• Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1
• Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2
• Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile Search

Oliver Starr’s live posts here on blognation.

Mike Rowehl’s Mobile 2.0 wrapup.

Dennis from WAP Review has an amazing writeup covering absolutely everything top to bottom.

Russ McGuire’s review on Mobile 2.0: Mobile Internet vs. Mobility

Barbara Ballard posted about how many in the audience were using laptops.

Tony Fish pointed out the Mobile Web 2.0 list of resources setup in netvibes.

Enrique C. Ortiz quick review.

Kelly Goto has a detailed post from the fireside chat.

Carlos Domingo posted his draft panel notes here.

Atakan Cetinsoy from MyStrands blogged his impressions here.

Marc Davis Flickr pictures ZoneTagged Mobile 2.0

On top of the reviews, some interesting discussions are heating up, starting with Rob Tiffany’s complaints why Windows Mobile was not used or not even mentioned during the event… Read Enrique C. Ortiz on spot reply to that question.

You can view my introduction to Mobile 2.0 on Slideshare; check also the Google’s move into mobile slide exchange project we just launched, together with Raimo van der Klein.

I created a Flickr group here, open to anyone. Anyone who has pictures of the event and a Flickr account, please subscribe to the group and forward them to the group from within your Flickr account.
I wanted to thank again our sponsors of the event: Nokia, Shozu, Vodafone Betavine, Taptu, Jamba, Mippin, Webwag, Rulespace and Swisscomm for the excellent wi-fi connections. Without them making this happen would not have been possible. Hope to see you all next year again!

I’ll be back with an update on conversations and posts around the event next Monday in the Carnival of the Mobilists # 96 which I’m hosting again here at mTrends.

Is the Mobile Web slowly leaving its’ infancy? Or is this really a start of something big coming our way? Googling the “mobile web” gives us 1.920.000 results, that’s pretty convincing something is happening. Using terms such as ‘mobile web‘ to ‘Mobile Web 2.0‘ and ‘Mobile 2.0‘ has raised many discussions amongst colleague bloggers; with the introduction of the iPhone, Steve Jobs introduced the ‘real internet’ on a portable device, so it’s really still an ongoing discussion… One thing we all do agree on is that’s it’s all about the world wide web becoming accessible on mobile devices, initiating a new wave of ‘next generation mobile services’.

Informa Telecoms and Media had the bright idea to gather some of the best thinkers and doers in this field and organize a real summit called the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference on 18-19 September 2007 in London.

Do check the agenda of the 2-day conference, the speakers line-up is really impressive: participations include web companies such as Yahoo, Skype, Amazon (Jeff Barr!); speakers from MNO’s including 3, O2, T-Mobile International, BT Global Services, Telia Sonera, Orange, Vodafone; by now well-known startups such as Shozu, AdMob, MyStrands, Eyeka, Widsets, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, in a unique mix including a lot of blog pals who explored the Mobile Web possibilities since it’s inception, like Daniel Appelquist, Ajit Jaokar, Tomi T Ahonen, Tom Hume and Russell Buckley, definately a unseen line-up so far of industry experts dedicated exclusively around the Mobile Web 2.0 topic in Europe.

Lots of essential topics will be covered, such as:

• Examine the impact of Mobile Web 2.0 on traditional mobile and web business models: Interaction of web, mobile, media, broadcast and telecom spheres
• Discover what services will bring Mobile Web 2.0 to life for the mass market
• Discuss how user interface strategies and widgets facilitate discoverability
• Determine market demand for mobile communities across global markets and demographic segments and understand how to capture target audiences
• Pool experiences of existing challenges to user experience and drive browser and device solutions
• Mobilise the Long-Tail to enable the move of Web 2.0 applications to mobile
• Determine who will own the user’s digital footprint

I have been invited to do a talk on the Mobile Web 2.0 Start-up Ecosystem, one of the topics I have been researching on an ongoing basis since I started this blog. Here’s what I will focus on for my talk at the conference:

• Integrating mobility: what mobility features are start-ups concentrating on?
• Where do we see new start-ups : Who is investing in what?
• How do Mobile Web 2.0 propositions differentiate?
• Evaluating new propositions: showcase of launches in recent months

So, to any start-up who recently launched and who is active in the Mobile Web 2.0 space, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me (click my name in top of my sidebar) to share your experiences, who knows you might become a showcase in my presentation

Note there’s also a pre-conference workshop on ‘Understanding Mobile Web 2.0′ the day before the event. To create discussion and to give delegates an idea of what to expect at the event, the organizers also launched a conference blog. Ajit Jaokar - who recently came to explain his views on the topic at MobileMonday Barcelona will be interviewing conference speakers and will post more thoughts on this blog.

I’m really looking forward to this one!

After a blog-break of more than a year Russell Beattie started to blog again. Here’s a link to his old blog if you want to read some essential stuff on the mobile and web convergent evolution of the last years, but now he’s back starting from scratch again here:

“I’ve been floating around the edges of a starting new blog for a while now, and I think the time has arrived for me to jump into the fray again. Actually, Diego is the one that inspired me tonight - his fifth blog anniversary is today (July 11th) and he’s starting a new one up at better named http://blog.diegodoval.com . That finally pushed me over the top, and I decided to just do it.” (…)

Russ starts off with a post called i-Dot Thoughts, on the “full web browser” and “mobile-specific browsers”, on the .mobi and the Safari iPhone approach in short, a topic Daniel and myself wrote on this weekend.

FYI: Russ is also working on a new project called Mowser (short for ‘mobile browser’), give it a try if you can!

It’s great to have you back, Russ!

I know how mTrends looks great on a PSP and on a Nokia N800; I haven’t seen my blog however on the iPhone, but I suppose it looks ok - the iPhone features Safari, the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device.

UPDATE => Kelly sended me some shots of mTrends on the iPhone, looks pretty cool, I cannot see from the screenshots if all my sidebar widgets work and if the feed subscription functionality works automatically in the mobile Safari browser… Anyway thanks, Kelly!

Since it’s going to take a while before everyone is able to buy an iPhone, and before device manufacture competitors catch up with Apple, browsing the Mobile Web stays somehow a non-standardised fragmented experience for most people. I have been writing about this confusion before, now it was kind of weird reading this ’strikethrough’ story from Scobleizer on how the iPhone gets confused with the mobile version of the Google Reader. Note that the Safari browser shows the desktop web pages - the ‘real’ internet, as most people know it; Robert just got confused with the different - mobile web - URL’s to browse to.

Now both ways to acces the internet will most probably have to live next to eachother on mobile devices since no real solution is in sight to converge the mobile web as ‘one real web’. There’s the ‘full’ browsing experience possible on the high-end devices like the iPhone, PSP’s and for example the Nokia N800 and then there are the ‘adaptive’ browsers that will adapt at it’s best the existing web page to your phone, like Nokia S60, Openwave and Opera browsers and others like Google Mobile transcoding normal web pages so they fit the mobile screen.

But what about the Mobile Web users?

To my view there are 4 different types of mobile web users to distinguish (some with a combined use), people who:

1. want to read their favourite feeds (through mobile browser or standalone applications)
2. browse websites and pages (using Nokia, Opera Mini or Safari browser on the mobile)
3. search from within a browser using Google Mobile, Yahoo! oneSearch, …
4. use standalone apps/tools to connect to people or communities like Jaiku, Twitter, Fring, Google Mobile Maps, etc…

Currently I use 1 and 4 the most, since browsing the web on the mobile is simply still too annoying and slow and searching on my phone not context relevant for me as it is now; I read feeds and use standalone apps to connect to people and find locations, that’s it. With the coming of more and more webapps, RSS tools and communities going mobile the coming months - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Netvibes, and alikes - some of them already there - the ways to get to those apps will become even more diverse, not to mention about how to handle correctly Mobile SEO.

For a simplified any (txt) feed ‘works on any device’ solution there’s still the real pre-cursor of the Mobile Web, Winksite. David Harper writes in this Love the Mobile Web post, how Winksite makes it easy to publish mobile Internet sites and build simple mobile connections via mobile phones:

“Winksite is the first standards compliant mobile Website builder that also includes RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such as forum, chat, and polls. This approach delivers fresh content, fast-loading screens, and universally accessible community features to you and your audience. The Winksite service is a free and fully hosted solution. No software install on your phone is necessary to view a Winksite powered mobile site. Learn more about how it works.”

I’ve had mTrends on Winksite since a while now just because my blog was always accesible on most phones, now for anyone who wants his internet blog or pages to be displayed correctly and available on ANY phone, I think Winksite is still the best option. Check below how MobileOK my Winksite blog is using the dotMobi’s MobiReady Report generator.

BTW: great tool! I like the way it displays information on pricing and speed of different networks to acces your mobile web pages.

To close this post, I would like to add this paragraph from Dave’s post on The mobile Web is not just for phones anymore:

“Gamers and their WiFi connected version of the Internet have been largely ignored by Mobile & Web 2.0 publishing and community platforms. We’re changing that. Whatever you choose to build at Winksite will now be served up optimized and fully functioning to the Sony PSP browser and Nintendo DS Lite Opera browser over WiFi connections. With the DS-Lite in mind we provide a fast loading and readable version while in overview mode. The PSP is delivered a version that eliminates the horizontal scrolling (and reduces the vertical scrolling) required to read posts and chat with your friends.”

Right attitude, Dave. Keep going!

What about you? I’m interested in your experiences and opinions

While we Europeans might seem envious not being able to get hold of an iPhone immediately, there’s really no reason to be; having a little bit of patience might be beneficial for Apple to learn how people will use the iPhone and for the users to get hold of an improved version in a couple of months.

Don’t get me wrong: while I’m pretty convinced that the web browsing experience on the iPhone is probably the best ever created on a mobile device, there’s also something as being able to acces the content from wherever you are, and this seems to be a minor point of the iPhone - currently only available through AT&T EDGE network, don’t miss Carlo ’s interesting take on this aspect.

FYI: above screenshot taken on a Nokia N95 when browsing the www.apple.com/iphone website, no photoshopping involved