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Vodafone misses the point of the mobile Internetby Rich Holdsworth, CTO ,Wapple Vodafone's recent move to make the Internet mobile is a step forward for mass adoption but a technological triple-jump backwards for the real mobile Internet. The new technology now in place on the Vodafone network adapts websites to mobile handsets. This means that where before, users hitting a URL that didn't support mobile devices would have been presented with a simple error, now they get to see something that, well, kind of works. The problem is that this is an automated transcoding solution, where a piece of software decides which parts of a website users should see on their mobile and discards the rest. Then it reduces that down to plain text, simple links and extra-compressed images before sending it to the mobile device. What actually gets delivered is a far cry from the original site, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in handset terms. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what you might have expected to see on a very basic WAP/WML site three or four years ago. But today's mobile browsers are capable of much more than this; carrying styles that reflect branding, displaying high resolution images and serving a much more mobile-centric experience. But there's much more to this. Mobile transcoding is, at its best, just a guess at what should and shouldn't be processed. This presents a huge problem for any software that must recognise the components of a website to use and determine those to discard.Take two websites from different organisations that serve a similar purpose. TV channel sites are great for this as while they all provide users with programme listing, news, special offers and extra activities; they generally present themselves in unique and very different ways. Any transcoding system is going to have a lot of trouble giving users what they really want from these sites. Visiting Sky.com on a Vodafone handset is testament to this problem. The content that the transcoding system delivers to a mobile device is utterly destroyed in the process, splitting it over several mobile pages, stripping main navigation, removing flash content and ultimately rendering it impossible to find out what's actually showing on their channels. And this presents the final part of the problem. Although the technology that underpins browsing on mobile handsets is 'Internet technology', the idea that what users want to do with their mobile phones is browse exactly the same content that they would while sat at a PC with time to kill is flawed. For mobile users, an Internet experience is about consuming information directly and immediately, not browsing for it over a period of time. On a PC we all have a big screen and a mouse. It's fast to click around from page to page, looking for the information we need and possibly clicking off track to explore a little. This simply isn't possible on mobile devices as the networks are considerably slower and navigation on a small screen is clumsy and awkward. A good mobile Internet site is one that has been built up with a mobile user in mind. It considers the content that mobile users want to consume and presents it to them in a way that they can use in a practical manner, given the constraints of their device. It takes advantage of the capabilities of modern mobile browsers and repurposes to more basic devices. Finally, of course, it reflects the brand behind the site and places the site owner in total control of the content they serve to their users. Sadly, while Vodafone's current solution does great things for educating users to the possibilities of using their mobile for much more than making phone calls, it falls short in actually presenting a useful and fulfilling experience to them, or allowing businesses to communicate effectively with their customers through the medium of 'mobile Internet'.
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