Mobile: The browser is not enough

August 29, 2008

Dave Sloan is director of marketing at Avot Media

By Dave Sloan

As mobile devices reach new levels of sophistication, many technology companies are working tirelessly on the next big problem: Bringing the Internet to mobile devices.

The mobile environment is notorious for some pretty significant obstacles: small screens, small keyboards, limited connectivity, fragmented operating systems and limited computing power.

Independently, the Internet and mobile adoption are exploding in adoption. Ironically, the combination of the two -- the mobile Internet -- is still a clunky and unusable experience.

Many vendors are approaching the problem from the Web browser perspective. First-generation mobile Web browsers were uniformly terrible, so there's an obvious need for improvement.

To attack the problem, Skyfire just launched Windows Mobile and Symbian support of its desktop-like mobile browser.

In addition, Opera mini has an impressive 44 million downloads, Firefox is working on a mobile browser, Microsoft has an army of developers working new mobile browser initiative called Deepfish and Google Android will no doubt have a new Web browsing experience to offer.

Many of these browsers have found a way to add popular desktop features such as Ajax, Flash and Java support. And most of these solutions add some degree of server-side power to assist the limited local resources of the mobile devices.

In early 2008, Apple set a new standard in mobile browsing with the Safari browser on the iPhone.

The iPhone lesson is clear: It is possible to have a great Web experience without being tethered to a desktop. The challenge will be in bringing usable Web experiences to the mass market, i.e. all the Symbian and BlackBerry phones of the world.

But are these aftermarket mobile browser solutions creating great user experiences? Is replicating the desktop experience really the best strategy for a mobile environment?

Also, how many clicks are required to accomplish a task? How much zooming and scrolling is required to get where you want to be?

Many aftermarket browsers miss the mark by overriding important device functionality, not taking advantage of device's native media player, and providing a desktop-like view of full HTML pages to tiny mobile screens.

Multimedia player
For many, the mobile device has become the multimedia player of choice. Video has become the Internet's richest asset, and video can easily be streamed via mobile video delivery engines.

Unlike the desktop, videos don't need to be streamed inside a player in the browser -- they can be streamed directly to the device's native media player.

Videos played in the Skyfire browser, for example, result in a choppy viewing experience because they are playing via Flash in a browser.

A much smoother solution is to transcode the video for the native media player and dynamically stream it according to the existing network conditions.

Mobile video could be the next "killer app" in mobile Internet adoption.

With NBC's big innovative media push for the Beijing Olympics, up to 45 percent of all mobile subscribers watched Olympics highlights.

Mobile video is streamed to a device client or played in the native media player. And the key to great mobile video delivery is the video formatting and delivery technology, not the complexity of the browser itself.

User experience matters
The advancement of mobile browsers is progress, yes. But enhancing the mobile browser does necessarily create a breakthrough mobile experience.

Great mobile experience comes from adjusting for the mobile environment -- less data entry, fewer clicks, leveraging mobile-specific data such as the GPS and filtering and optimizing the experience to make it on the go.

Delightful mobile experiences are a combination of the right content, the right context and the right discovery method, or user experience.

In some cases it is SMS for content, click from a link in email, "send to mobile" from a desktop, or open from an application such as Facebook Mobile.

Occasionally, it is from a browser, via a WAP site or a full HTML site. Again, the quality of the browser is a plus, not necessarily a game changer.

An example of a great mobile application is Google Mobile Maps.

Google Mobile Maps leverages the location of your phone and pulls content from the Internet into a device-specific application.

Web content is often best presented contextually in an application, not a browser. Opening the full HTML page at http://maps.google.com in a mobile browser would not be a pleasant experience.

Web video has gone mainstream, with 119 million unique viewers viewing 7.5 billion video streams in May 2008. Video-hungry mobile users can easily access this rich content via mobile.

When a video is streamed to a device via a mobile video delivery solution, it plays in the native media player and throttles its stream to accommodate the network conditions. The complexity of the browser itself has nothing to do with high quality video playback.

Mobile when mobile
Consider common mobile use cases: What do mobile users want to do with their device while they are in line at Starbucks or have 20 minutes to kill in a waiting room?

They check their email, send SMS, get the weather forecast, listen to music, update their status on Facebook, or watch sports or entertainment video clips. Opening a mobile browser and surfing the Web just doesn't make sense in this context.

In many ways, the mobile Internet experience can surpass the desktop mobile Internet experience.

Mobile devices can leverage location-based services, capture and broadcast video, and leverage native application interfaces. Discovery of content could come from SMS response, links in wireless email, or location-based services.

There's more to the mobile experience than browsers and search. After search, popular Internet tasks include shopping, banking, social networking and entertainment.

Vendors who nail the user experience by leveraging tools and methods that are specific to mobile will drive the adoption of the mobile Internet, increasing its value to everyone.

David Sloan is director of product marketing at Avot Media, Sunnyvale, CA. Reach him at