Dr. Dobb's Digest September 2009
Hearing that the world's population will jump to more than 7 billion people within the next couple of years is surprising enough. Learning that 5 billion members of that population will have mobile phones -- many of them Internet enabled -- is staggering. Looking at this another way, 10 years ago, 100 million people used the Internet. Today, that number is approximately 1.4 billion and growing. Moreover, at least according to the W3C's Tim Burners-Lee, over the next couple of years, more people will have their first Web encounter with a mobile device rather than a laptop or desktop computer. Clearly, we're looking at a time of great change, but of great opportunity, too.
The obvious challenges start with creating software for small form factor mobile devices that have constrained and often unique user interfaces. Let's face it: It won't do anyone any good if millions of these first-time Web visitors have an unsatisfactory user experience due to poorly designed UIs. Developers can't afford to not get it right the first time because someone somewhere else will get it right. But at the same time, the opportunities are just as obvious: Five billion sets of eyeballs are a lot of eyeballs.
Even though the W3C acknowledges that more people have access to mobile devices than access to a desktop computer (especially in developing countries), its vision is still for one Web. Same Web, different user experience. To make this vision a reality, the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (www.w3.org/Mobile/) has compiled its Mobile Web Best Practices (www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/), which provides creators, managers, and operators of websites with guidelines for developing to provide a positive user experience on mobile devices. Moreover, the W3C has launched mobileOK (www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK/), which lets content providers promote their content as suitable for use on basic mobile devices. This includes the W3C mobileOK Checker (http://validator.w3.org/mobile/), which tests your organization's website to determine its level of mobile friendliness. (An overview of the W3C's best practices for mobile has been prepared by Nokia Research and is available at research.nokia.com/files/HoschkaBestPractises.pdf.)
At the same time, a merging of sorts is underway as laptops grow smaller ("netbooks") and cell phones grow larger in capability, if not size. Netbooks are becoming popular because of their smaller size and price (compared to laptops), not to mention their single-minded features targeting online. To date, most netbooks have come from traditional PC manufacturers (HP, Acer, Asus, Dell, and the like) running on Linux or Windows. To the best of my knowledge, Nokia is the first mobile phone vendor to roll out a netbook with its recently announced, surprisingly pricey Nokia Booklet G3. The Booklet has a 120-GB hard disk, 1 GB of RAM, has a 1280x720 pixel display, and runs Windows 7 on an Intel Atom Z530, 1.6-Ghz CPU. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nokia N97 mobile phone sports 32 GB of storage, 128 MB of RAM, runs Symbian OS on an ARM 11 434-MHz CPU, has a 360x640 pixel display, full QWERTY keyboard, and supports handwriting recognition. Granted, they aren't the same, but they are getting closer.
From a developer's perspective, the opportunities arise from being able to write applications for platforms ranging from netbooks to Internet-enabled mobile phones. That's the good part. The flip side, however, is that writing for different operating system platforms can be a real pain. But back to Nokia: The company seems to offer opportunities with Qt (qt.nokia.com), the cross-platform C++ UI and application framework that Nokia acquired last year. Being able to write a single application that easily ports to other devices and platforms is a real plus -- assuming you are familiar with the ins-and-outs of best practices for small-footprint mobile devices.
What this comes back to are the pseudo-standards that are emerging for software development best practices for mobile devices. Start there. You won't be sorry.