I expect this year to be an exciting one for mobile browsing and mobile web apps. Here are my predictions of what 2010 will bring to mobile web sites, services and browsers.
There will be major improvements in smartphone mobile browser technology . Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, Skyfire, Google and RIM will compete to deliver a near desktop experience on high end devices. Expect to see better and faster JavaScript engines and increased support for HTML 5's offline storage, geolocation, SVG and video features. Desktop level Adobe Flash support will also appear on most smartphone platforms, although probably not on the iPhone.
Full-Web browsers will become the norm for feature phones. Feature phones have traditionally used WAP2 browsers that can only handle made for mobile pages less than about 20KB in size, Full-Web browsers can handle at least 500KB pages and can load desktop sites as long as they don't require Flash or advanced JavaScript support. Opera Mini, Bolt and UC will push the boundaries of proxy based browsing to add desktop/smartphone features like tabbed browsing, copy/paste, bookmarklets and streaming video to many feature phones. Javascript performance of proxy based browsers will improve but will continue to be a weak point. Manufacturers and operators will increasingly specify proxy based full-web browsers or the embedded full-web direct browsers from Opera, Nokia (S40 Webkit), Netfront and Teleca on mid-range phones. The ancient Openwave and Nokia WAP browsers will be relegated to only the most basic phones.
"Middle-Web" sites will proliferate. These are what used to be called "iPhone Web Apps" They render as a single column like traditional mobile sites but with larger page sizes, more and larger images and judicious use of JavaScript for asynchronous partial page updates and eye candy like rollover effects. Some Middle-Web sites only support Webkit based touch browsers (iPhone, WebOS and Android) but the better ones will use graceful degradation and progressive enhancement to support the less capable full-web browsers of feature phones.
Traditional mobile web sites will start to disappear - prematurely. With interest and development effort centered around the middle-web, publishers and developers will tend to neglect their legacy mobile sites. This will be a mistake. Even though the handset replacement cycle averages 18 moths in the US and Europe, old phones live on for five years or more in the developing world. Case in point, according to AdMob (PDF), the most popular handsets in Indonesia are the Nokia N70 and 6600 which are five and seven years old. Developing markets are also where mobile traffic is growing the fastest; according to Opera betwen Nov 2008 and Nov 2009 Opera Mini page views increased by 604.5% in Indonesia, 445.3% in South Africa and 1091.1% in Vietnam. Those increases are on top very significant traffic volume as the three countries are in the top ten in the world in overall Opera Mini traffic.
The mobile web will look more and more like the desktop web. Publishers, developers and advertisers are waking up to the fact that more people are now browsing with phones than with PCs! Things that are taken for granted in the desktop web like SEO, thematic consistency and big name, big dollar ad campaigns will increasingly come to the mobile web.
Mobile data plans will change
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posted by Dennis Bournique
January 4, 2010 @ 3:38 pm
7 View Comments
