I can’t believe I didn’t see this site before. Mobility.mobi is a nine month old online forum dedicated to discussing the mobile web and especially the .mobi top level domain (TLD). It’s very active with over 7000 and threads and 46,000 posts. Lot’s of discussions of new mobile sites, industry news, SEO, domaineering and buying selling and trading .mobi domains. There are also active sub-forums for mobile web development questions, discussing mobile publishing platforms, hosting and legal issues like domain name disputes.

Mobility.mobi uses browser detection to display either the full PC version of the vBulletin based forum or a mobile one using a great mobile template developed in-house by mobility.mobi. There doesn’t seem to be a way to force the mobile version if browser detection fails although I wasn’t able to make it fail with any of the dozen or so mobile user agents I tried.

Mobility.mobi’s mobile front page mobile scores a perfect 5 out of 5 on the Ready.mobi test. The index pages listing the posts in each forum and the post pages themselves can get quite large however, well over the 10KB of markup and 20KB overall limits generally recommended for “one-size fits all” mobile sites. If this causes out of memory errors on your phone, and you are a registered user you can change the number of posts per page from the default of 25 to five on the Options Page which should help a bit. You can only change the settings from the PC version though.

Except for options, the mobile version offers almost all of the functionality of the PC site including posting, private messaging and registering for the site. It’s not necessary to register to view the site except for a few members only sub-forums. You have to register to post, of course.

It’s really inspiring to see Mobility.mobi doing so well. Anyone who has any doubts about the mobile web’s vitality should spend a little time poking around. There’s a friendly, cooperative feel to mobility.mobi with developers and publishers helping each other out without any cattiness and flame wars so common to online forums.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

“”

Tesco the leading UK grocer has, like some of its peers around the world, launched an MVNO with O2. To supplement their revenues they have trialled placing ads on their WAP portal. They are very pleased with the returns on the trial :

Since May 2007, they have announced a strong month on month growth including 300,000 extra unique visitors in December.

Brands that have advertised on the portal included Bee Movie, ITV, Nivea and Teletext. The ads were delivered and sold by 4th Screen Advertising and have apparently seen a click through rate of between 3% and 7%.

Other interesting facts released by a survey commissioned by Tesco:

* 60% of portal users are female,

* average age is 36

* 60% say they visit it at least once a month,and

* 69% say they would click on a relevant ad.

Ashley Schofield, head of customer management at Tesco Mobile, said in a statement: “Our customers are showing a real appetite for more products and services through the mobile internet. Delivering more great experiences and value through our portal is a priority for this year.”

.com/Home.aspx”>”"

For those of you who don’t know about Orkut, here is what Wikipedia stats :

Orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google – Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and 2nd most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil. In fact, as of March 2008, 67.5% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 15.4%. By April 2008, Orkut’s user base numbered at around 120 million, next only to MySpace.

Orkut is thus a lesser know (in Europe and the USA) social network. Like other networks a user first creates a “Profile”, in which the user provides “Social”, “Professional” and “Personal” details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos with the additional option of creating either restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.

The most popular features are :

“Scrapping” is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts immediately when a scrap is received was added, adding instant messaging-like capabilities to Orkut.

“Communities”. Anyone with an Orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than one million communities on Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site’s launch. There were a total of 47,092,584 communities on Orkut as per March 24,2008 4:25PM IST (+5:30 GMT). With the recent addition of the search topic feature in the communities, some Orkut communities become the de facto source for the website links to movies, e-books etc.

On the mobile

Like many Google mobile initiatives it is great and yet not enough. Great because we all want to see these guys, with their resources and energy, believe in and significantly enter the mobile web space. It is not enough because it is a poor relative of their web site. The main features are there but you can’t create an account, you can’t modify your profile on your mobile and it seems like communities doesn’t work yet.

“” “”

Nevertheless it isn’t all bad news. It is a first step. What we hope at MobilOpen is that they will continue to work on this and make it truly mobile. There is now reason why they can’t make Orkut’s great features work 100% on a mobile.

Some other interesting articles about Orkut mobile :

Rahul Bansal blog : Devils Workshop

Darnell Clayton in Inside Orkut

I’m a mobile geek and I like my smartphone toys but I’m starting to wonder if they are really necessary. Smartphone sales are increasing but I have this wild theory that in a few years they will cease to exist as a separate class of devices.

First a definition. Not everyone even agrees what constitutes a smartphone. For the purpose of this argument it’s a device running a named mobile operating system including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry and the iPhone’s OS X. Smartphones generally have full web browsers, fast processors, lots of memory and, except for the Blackberry, support installing native applications in addition to Java ones.

What’s going to knock out the smartphone? Look for a one-two punch from ever more capable feature phones and Linux, especially Android.

There’s a perception that you need a smartphone to have advanced applications and services on a phone. That used to be true but Java ME and the Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) of popular feature phones are getting to the point where they can do almost everything that a branded OS can.

I don’t really care about OS labels but there are certain features that I require in a phone. Here’s my list. Note that all of these can be found in at least some mass-market feature phones.

* Synchronize Contacts, Calendar, To-Do’s and Notes between phone and PC – I use this feature heavily but it’s hardly exclusive to smartphones. All but the very cheapest Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones come with free synchronization software that works very well indeed. Motorola has PC Tools which costs extra. Samsung, LG and the other Asian phone manufacturers don’t seem to offer any sync software but there are various 3rd party and free synchronization applications that work with most of these phones.

* An extensive library of installable applications – The number and variety of Java ME applications is a match for what’s available as native applications for any of the popular smartphones. Java has file system managers, email, SSH and FTP clients, mapping programs, RSS readers, password managers and thousands of games.

* Application access to phone features like contacts, calendar, gps and network – This doesn’t really exist yet regardless of platform. Stupid “security” restrictions keep users from using really being able to use either Java or smartphone native applications to their fullest with phone resources. Application signing and/or hacks are generally needed to get these types of applications working on any platform. There are a few exceptions, like Motorola’s iDEN feature phones which allow users to grant unsigned Java apps blanket GPS access, something AFAIK no other platform does.

* System level Copy and Paste – This is a must for me, whether it’s copying a mailing addresses from an email or SMS or pasting a URL into the browser, I can’t live without copy and paste. Smartphones, with the exception of the iPhone and pre 6.1 Windows Mobile Standard all support some sort of copy/paste. This is less common on feature phones but it exists. Most Sony-Ericsson phones let you copy and paste to and from any input field – even across applications including Java apps. Some versions of the much maligned Motorola RAZR feature a rudimentery copy and paste function.

* Task Switching – This another thing that is essential to me and also probably the biggest differentiator of smartphones. Most feature phones can only load one program at a time. But again there are exceptions, Sony Ericsson again leads the way with the ability to suspend and switch between applications. Motorola iDEN’s, even cheap prepaid models like the i425, go one better and actually seem to multi-task Java applications. I can suspend Opera Mini while it’s loading a page, switch to a Java notepad application to jot something down and when I go back to Opera the page is fully loaded.

* A full featured media players – Pretty much a tie here. Loads of feature phones have capable audio and video players.

* A decent camera – Another tie. I’ve yet to see a great camera on any phone. My N95 is OK but it doesn’t come close to the quality of even an entry level digital camera. Some feature phones have pretty good cameras (again mostly Sony Ericcsons) and some have awful ones.

Given the abilities found in some feature phones it seems that it would be possible to build one every bit as capable as the best smartphone. And all other things being equal, it should be lighter, cheaper, easier to operate and have longer battery life than the equivalent smartphone.

I think we are about to see an explosion of inexpensive feature phones running nameless operating systems but with abilities and performance rivaling today’s smartphones. Thank the iPhone for this. It’s raised ordinary consumer’s expectations of what a mobile phone can do. Normobs want iPhone-like features at the traditional “free with 2 year contract” price point. Carriers and manufacturers can and will meet this demand by building iPhone-lites using off the shelf RTOS and Java applications.

Then there is Google which is building Android to dominate mobile advertising and cement it’s position as biggest and most profitable tech company. The big G is spending millions to build and give away a mobile OS and hardware reference design more powerful than Symbian, WinMo, Palm or Blackberry. Hardware manufacturers can build Android phones with zero licensing costs and minimal hardware design expense to provide another cheap alternative to the iPhone and to traditional smartphones.

It’s really not so much that the smartphone will die but that every phone will become a smartphone. There will always be high end devices but it will be harder and harder for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, RIM and even Apple to differentiate themselves.

These changes will ultimately be good for the mobile ecosystem. The smartphone features that only 10% of users currently enjoy will go mainstream. As phones with advanced PIM functions, copy and paste, full web browsers like Opera Mini, apps like Google Maps and Mail and iTunes like content portals become the norm we will see a mobile computing surge that will make the PC and wired Web revolution of the last 30 years pale in comparison.

What do you think? Will the expansion of advanced features to mainstream handsets do away will the smartphone market? Dennis would love your comments.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com