iPhone: most popular device to surf the web but do we need a two tier approach?
Rating: Mobile Web v Broadband Web
They Say: Lightspeed - The Venture Partners quote the NY Times that over Christmas 2007, Google got more traffic from iPhones than from any other type of phone
but this flurry of increasing mobile device could lead onto a head on collision according to the author of the Lightspeed piece - Jeremy Liew.
He continues that at the same time web pages are getting bigger and bigger with “the average web page tripled (ing) in size since 2003“. He quotes WebsiteOptimization.com who say “Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax certainly contribute to the increase in the number of objects per page, as well as the growth in JavaScript file size. Dynamically generated sites from content management systems are typically not as optimized as hand-tuned sites, and often carry over site-wide CSS, JavaScript, and page components to every page on a site.”
We say: I’m sure Bena will have something to say about her thoughts on this when she gets back from her travels but personally I still think that a company, designer, web company etc should have separate strategies for Mobile and home/work high speed connections. Even with companies such as Adobe trying to agree specs for mobile devices the market is too fragmented and incoherent. You need a specialist strategy for mobile where content, interaction, navigation and ease of use are thought about from the perspective of the mobile end user. Yes, we have RSS but that’s not the feature rich experience that I believe most users want.
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2 Responses to “iPhone: most popular device to surf the web but do we need a two tier approach?”
I agree with your points you are making here. Not only do we have to worry about connection speed, but also the inclination of carriers to keep the price of data high as long as possible. Take Rogers for example, charging 5c per KB, so a site where no consideration is taken for mobile would cost the user easily over $10-$15 (only 200-300KB).
Comment made on May 7th, 2008 at 11:15 amHi Olaf
ouch, that had better be a good site or the end user is going to feel extremely “ripped” off..here in the UK we are just starting to see the main mobile carriers move to flat rate data plans but if you step out of the data plan it gets relatively expensive. Not only that but most mobile devices just do not have the screen size still, yes we have the exceptions but shouldn’t we build for the average handset and not the exceptions?
Comment made on May 7th, 2008 at 12:59 pmLeave a Comment