Recently, I bought my wife and myself his-and-hers Windows Mobile 5.0 gadget phones. Now I'll admit freely that I'm not a huge cell phone user, and I've always considered maintaining a cell phone as a necessary evil in the consulting world. Since I have been experimenting with the .NET Compact Framework SDK, I figured this could have potential in software development projects I'm working on.
What is truly amazing is the amount of power that can be packed into one of these little devices. This device, the T-Mobile MDA (link) has built-in WiFi, bluetooth and infrared beaming, it synchs with Outlook, et al, using ActiveSync, it comes with a mini MSIE (approximately IE 5.5), Pocket Word and Excel, a PDF viewer, some games, and other stuff. There is a plethora of free and commercial software for the phone, and I downloaded a Command Prompt program and a Registry Editor. Using Visual Studio 2005, you can easily develop and deploy your own .NET software to this device, including SQL CE 5.0, which comes with a cute little Query Analyzer for ad hoc querying and debugging. Equipping this device with a 1 GB MiniSD memory card gives you ample room for about 100 MP3s that you can play with the mini version of Media Player.
Oh, and did I mention that you can make and receive phone calls with this device?
It is amazing that this thing runs on about 500 MHz processor and delivers this kind of punch. When I think back to my first PC, that I bought 13 years ago, this little gadget blows it away.
I love almost everything about this device except for one thing: most web sites look downright awful on the web browser. Nearly all web sites are designed for 1024x768 screen size, with the assumption that the user will be using it at a desktop or laptop. Most web sites use a boatload of graphics, with the assumption that bandwidth is not a problem. When my device is connected via WiFi, this really isn't a problem, but more often I connect to the Internet using GPRS, which is much slower a typical broadband connection and more latent than even a dial-up modem connection.
As a developer, I see the conundrum. Today, most people do not use mobile devices to browse the Internet. But I bought this device for $249 last year, and I am sure that it will be half that price by the end of the year. Why would I want to develop a web site for such a niche market? Until Firefox started gaining popularity, I only designed for MSIE since that was biggest target. But thinking forward, the mobile web market is poised to boom in the next two years.
So what choices do we have as developers? We could work by redesigning one site at a time to comply with the new miniature standards. This is a large development effort and will cost businesses a lot of money to implement. Do I think this will actually happen? Only the largest companies or the ones most directly involved in web businesses will do it. For instance, GoDaddy has a mobile web interface that I used to register a domain using my gadget phone. But most vendors are not doing this yet.
So what about medium to small-business web sites? I think there needs to be a handly plug-in the can convert a web site to mobile formatting when a mobile web browser makes a request. My idea is that I could create an HTML proxy that makes the actual HTTP request from the web server, but then reformats the HTML and imagery that is sent back as a response. Current mobile web browsers make the full request and drop formatting on the client. An HTML proxy that can be installed on the web site would provide an alternative where the crash diet occurs on the server, resulting in faster loading web pages on the mobile web browser.
My thought is that there would need to be certain flavors that are available immediately. Most dynamic pages are written using PHP, ASP and ASP.NET these days. These would be the immediate target systems. I have yet to flesh out the details of this server HTML proxy, but I'm going to be investigating this this year. If you are interested in enabling people to use the Internet more effectively please e-mail me. I think this is a pretty good idea, but I'm willing to listen to better ones!