There's been a lot of buzz lately about Mobile Transcoding which I define as an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device.
The promise of transcoding is that it will allow any web site to be viewed on any handheld device. I really don't think a machine translation of a site designed for an 800x600 pixel monitor will ever be as attractive or as usable on a 128x160 phone screen as a well designed mobile specific site. Still, the ratio of desktop to mobile sites on the web is estimated to be 10 to 1, so transcoding could greatly increase the quantity and variety of information available to mobile devices.
A while back I reviewed Opera Mini which is a Java ME application running on the phone which talks to a web back-end. This is a very powerful combination as the web server can, in addition to transcoding, also communicate with Java front-end using a compressed binary protocol to decrease transfer time. Another advantage is that the web service knows exactly what the capabilities of the phone client are which makes for a simpler and more reliable service than if the web service has to work around the bugs and inconsistencies in multiple mobile browsers. The transcoding sites in this review do not require a specific client on the phone which has the advantage of working with any WAP capable phone. Another plus for a server-only solution is that some provider's (like Verizon and Alltel in the US) don't support Java apps or don't allow Java to access the web or charge more for Java data access as opposed to WAP.
What tasks does a transcoding service for mobiles need to perform? I can see the following:
I'm using the mobile browser emulators from Nokia, Motorola, Openwave, Sony Ericsson and Access on my desktop for most of my testing. This allows me to compare the sites on multiple browsers and also makes it easy to capture screenshots. I'm using two sites for testing, The first site is this blog, which represents a simple, mostly standards compliant site with no large images. But it is 60KB page - too large for many phone browsers which will allows me to test the transcoding site's ability to break large pages into smaller ones. The second site is http://www.southwest.com/ an example of a typical e-commerce site and which incidentally is one of the few airlines which does not have a mobile site!
Part 1 will review loband.org and Phonifier.com. Future posts will cover IYHY, Skweezer and Mobile Leap. Because these site do not really have any content of their own, the "Content" star rating given these sites will reflect the quality of the transcoding. You can quickly try these sites on your mobile by going to my mobile portal yeswap.com and following the menu path Technology|Internet|Mobile Proxies
loband.org
loband is a non-profit project whose goal is to make complex pages usable over low bandwidth connections in underdeveloped countries. It also helps make sites more usable on PDAs and phones. While not billed as a mobile transcoding proxy, I've included it because it shares many of the characteristics of one.
I've found this site unreliable in the past and, in fact, it was down for several days while I was testing. Loband doesn't split pages that are too large for the device. Loband replaces images with an "[i]" link, clicking the link will display the original image without any rescaling or image conversion. Loband also unnecessarily
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posted by Dennis Bournique
October 28, 2005 @ 11:17 pm
7 View Comments
