Re: White paper on the potential next steps on mobile web in developing countries

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 20:59:20 +0530, stephane boyera <boyera@w3.org> wrote:

> As a followup of the workshop ([1]) I just published a white paper ([2])
> describing roughly the general framework W3C is planning to follow in
> the next monthes and the rationale behind our plans.
>
> Feel free to send comments privately or start discussion here.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/MWI-EC/cfp.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2006/12/digital_divide/public.html

Hi Stéphane,

Thanks for this. I think it is a valuable read. Some comments:

In looking at guidelines for developing mobile applications, this work should be 
coordinated wth the existing work on Mobile Web Best Practices, with a goal of 
ensuring that there is a seamless transition from feature phones to high-end 
expensive mobile tablet type devices. It is also important to include hardware 
manufacturers and network operators in this kind of discussion (as we have 
already done in Mobile Web Best Practices). But even more important is to 
include people who are deploying applications.

The suggestion of a text based browser is an interesting one. While in principle 
the web should work fine on such a browser, I am not sure that the intermediate 
step is as valid now as it was in the early days of the web. It seems that 
graphics capability is relatively much cheaper (compared to computing power) 
than it was then, and by the time you have the capacity to put networking and 
web page processing on the phone, you generally have the power to put a full 
browser there.

Opera mini provides access to the full web on mid-range phones in a small 
package. Current text-only browsers are at least several times the size of the 
high-end version. It is, of course, technically possible to apply the same model 
to an SMS-based browser (this is sort of what Agora was, via email, many years 
ago - and in 2000 I know that browser was in active use, although I am not sure 
if it is still running anywhere). The question is whether it is finacially 
viable - this depends on the cost of SMS traffic compared to the cost of real 
data, and on the difference in manufacture cost for the hardware.

What do people think?

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk
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Received on Saturday, 10 February 2007 04:31:01 UTC