Nokia’s next tablet device is designed in the same vein as their N810, albeit significantly more polished. Though it doesn’t appear to have an official name as of yet, it’s referred to internally as “N900″, “Rover”, or “Maemo Flagship”. We’ll be referring to this device as the N900 for the rest of this post, though it’s quite possible that this name will change.

The N900 is very similar to the Nokia N97 aesthetically, having a 3.5″ touchscreen above a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and many of the same design features. However, the screen of the N900 is significantly higher resolution (800×480 as opposed to 360×640) and, unlike that of the N97, does not tilt up. Additionally, the N900 does not appear to feature the navi-keys found on the slide-out layer of the N97. And, of course, it runs Maemo rather than S60.

This is my first post on MobilOpen; so let me introduce myself. My name is Naiyer Asif. I am an Indian and a mobile web designer and reviewer. My posts are often based on my experiences and experiments on mobile web.This one is also a quick analysis of thousands of mobile sites I have come across till date.

The tiny mistakes that can doom your mobile site.Here they go one by one…

Absence of About Page/Site Description When you reach a mobile site,what do you want to know at the first instance.”What is this all about?” Giving a short introduction to your service is extremely important.People on the go are in very hurry.They don’t have enough time to figure it out themselves.You should minimize their work.The best way to do this is to provide a short paragraph below the header of your page with a link to your full “about page”.Mippin.com implements this very nicely.

Absence of Contact/Feedback method Be accessible.The end-user knows better than you what your site lacks. If you don’t provide a contact form,you lose a big chance to take your site to the next level adapting to the rapidly changing mobile scenario.Always provide a contact method for users to get new ideas,complaints and error reports. Remember,providing a contact form is always better than merely specifying an email.The social media sites like Twitter can also be used for direct user interaction and feedback.

Incorrect Use of Container Elements A lot of developers use tables to enhance the “look and feel” of their mobile sites. Sadly enough,tables were not created for glamorising your webpages. They were created to present statistical information in a tabular form.Presentational tables increase page weight and plummet your site’s mobile-readiness adversely. Similarly,many a developers use divisions repeatedly to list the menu items. Repeated use of divisions also increases page weight.For listing the items,always use list containers.

Absence of Accesskey Accelerators Mobile web experience needs to be fast and “accesskeys” are essentially a boon to mobile browsing. While they might not have been so successful on desktops,accesskeys are almost a necessity for mobile sites. They fasten the navigation considerably by reducing the overall click distance. If you don’t provide them,users are likely to struggle scrolling your site.

Absence of a link to Full Website Everyone has their own needs and preferences. People on capable browsers might wish to use your full desktop website instead of its mobile edition. If you fail to provide a method to bypass the mobile version,you are going to be disliked by users. Never force a particular version of your site on a specific browser without providing an option to switch to the other version.

I know I have missed many other issues. If you want to share more “grave and oft-committed” mistakes of mobile web developers, let us know in comments.

mobiSiteGalore one of the pioneers of the mobile web with their PC based mobile site builder have taken their tool to the next level, they have taken the guts from their builder and made it accessible to mobile only users.

Now anyone with a mobile connected to the web with a GPRS connection can now create their own mobile site. No fancy smartphone needed either a normal WAP phone will do just fine.

I got to give it to these guys.. they are in my view spot on in their creation of a tool accessible to the masses. As I reported in my last article millions of new users are getting their first mobile : close to 300 million users in India and the same in many developing countries. These new users want to taste the web and don’t have access to PCs so they do what Pc users would do except from their mobile. And one of the things people want to do is create their own site to talk about themselves, to meet people, to promote something or to sell something. This is the first step in that direction.

There are other site creators but they are more based around a community, they are more profile like or blog like. Whereas mobiSiteGalore allows users much more freedom in what they want to create. I am looking forward to see how users like their tool.

People are finally starting to notice the mobile web.. with its quirks, specific issues and hurdles and mostly its vast potential. Also driven by a mostly European impetuous developers are starting to realize that mobile web sites should be specifically designed and built. What I am trying to say is they aren’t just poor cousins of web sites… they fulfill another function. A function based on being mobile, on snacking content, on staying in touch always, on killing time pursuits.. and for the developing world on a replacement to the PC based web.

So what I would like to do is give a few resources that my team has found interesting. Following will be forums, blogs and tools that can be used for developers or managers who are getting acquainted with the mobile internet which todays latest mobile phones can easily access to.

I guess to start off is the people behind .mobi sub domain and who are based in Dublin and push very hard to make .mobi THE destination for mobile sites :

You can find many resources and info on their sites and blogs. They also link to many exemplary mobile web sites so you can see what is best practices and what should be avoided.

A pretty cool mobile web site that talks about .mobi is this one :

I would suggest that you visit directly from a few mobile devices and maybe an emulator so you can see the differences for yourselves.

The next place I would suggest you go is here :

These are the same people as .mobi and they provide quite a few pointers on how to develop a proper .mobi site.

Also with all the visibility that the iPhone is making for the mobile web it can be worthwhile to start right from th beginning to look at what it takes to make a iPhone and iPode touch compatible site. Apple gives here the stuff to start off :

The next place to visit is our friends over Mobility. They are a forum of mobile enthusiasts, developers, entrepreneurs and industry specialists.

You can visit from both a PC or from your mobile device.

To fully understand the user agent issues and to tap into the largest open source database of mobile device it is a must to visit Luca Passani’s WURFL here :

At this point hopefully you will have tried building your own site.. well then it is time to get a rating :

Once you know about all these things and you build your site it may be time to earn some money… that is where things like MobPartner.mobi come in :

Finally as we all know networking is super important.. well I found a small but growing network on Linkedin :

Here are a few great blogs that will help you understand the various issues surrounding mobile sites and the revenue models that are used :

http://www.developing.mobi

http://mobienthusiast.mobi

http://www.mobiadnews.com/

http://www.m-trends.org/

http://wapreview.com/blog/

http://igloo.mobi/

The mobile world is abuzz with the news of Nokia’s plans to open source Symbian. There’s been a lot of great analysis of what this means for Nokia and its major competitors. If you aren’t up to speed on what it means, I recommend Micheal Mace’s in depth business analysis, Symbian changes everything, and nothing and Simon Judge’s developer perspective.

What I’m wondering though is how the existence of a free, high quality, open source mobile software stack will change the whole mobile ecosystem. I’m struck by two things:

* The barriers to entry for anyone wanting to manufacture advanced handsets have been lowered dramatically. There are hundreds of mobile phone makers in China and elsewhere with very low costs making cheap hones for the domestic market. Will some of them add Symbian or Android phones to their product mix? I think they will and that we will see direct to consumer online sales of generic smartphones before very long. Think zzzPhone or fake iPhone but toting a real OS.

* Open sourcing Symbian offers the possibility of community development based on the Symbian core. Imagine Symbian Kernel hackers branching off the Symbian core to create custom mobile operating systems. With the full source its possible to do things like removing the restrictions on unsigned applications and adding features that Nokia’s carrier customers don’t want you to have like VOIP over 3G. Someday will we be flashing our old S60 handsets with customized Symbian builds from a mobile hacker community?

A lot depends on just how complete Symbian’s open source offering is. I don’t think the software that manages the cellular radio or the boot loader needed to flash a new OS onto a phone are considered part of the OS. There’s a lot of licensed intellectual property tied up in cellular radio software that can’t open sourced. The would-be phone manufacturer and the hacker will have quite a bit of work to do to fill in the missing pieces.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

The html input tag is what’s used to display a text box on a Web page. Input has an optional type parameter. Specifying type=”password” causes characters to be masked, asterisk is displayed instead of the character typed. It’s standard practice on the “big” web to to use type=”password” on any field where the user enters a password or PIN.

This practice has been carried over to the mobile Web were I think it hurts usability while doing little or nothing to enhance security.

Of course, security on the web is real concern. Phishing and identity theft are constantly in the news. For eCommerce and banking sites I’m willing to put up with a little inconvenience in the name of security. But does masking the password of, say, an online RSS reader really make us any safer? What’s the worst that can happen, someone marking all our feeds as read?

Phones have small screens and correspondingly small fonts. It’s hard to read a mobile screen from a distance of more than a couple of feet. If your worried about password theft, you can usually turn away from onlookers or shield the screen with your hand while entering your password. I think there is a far greater likelihood of a bad guy stealing you password by watching which keys you are pressing than by reading the screen.

Mobiles generally show you the actual character for a fraction of a second before it changes to an asterisk but It’s still hard to accurately triple tap passwords on a phone. It’s especially difficult if you use “strong” passwords with a mix of upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.

What do you think, do masked password fields on mobile web pages actually enhance security? And even if they do in some small way are they worth the cost in usability; especially on sites where there’s no risk of financial loss?

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

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

Sign the Manifesto! Rules for Ethical Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto is developers’ answer to the arrogance of Vodafone, Novarra and all of the others who find it legitimate to disrupt the mobile web.

A ghost is haunting the mobile web, the ghost of content reformatting. The mobile web has never been a simple platform to develop for, given the fragmentation of the underlying technology: different devices, different browsers and different networks have made mobile web development a challenge for programmers and content authors from the beginning.

Yet, in this hard environment, one thing has stayed sacred throughout the years: the HTTP Protocol.

Until today, developers of mobile websites could count on the fact that the HTTP headers from a mobile device would reach the intended webserver with their integrity respected.

Alas, this basic assumption on which thousands of developers have built their applications is put to the test by a recent trend among Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

Tools that were originally devised as utilities to split up web pages and deliver a best-effort user-experience on a mobile device are today being marketed as solutions to bring the full web to mobile by reformatting vendors. Some MNOs are buying into this vision and are implementing reformatting proxies into their networks that will intercept and reformat all HTTP traffic to any HTTP server without safeguarding those sites which strive to deliver a mobile-optimised user-experience, or, at least, not safeguarding them sufficiently.

This situation is a threat to the neutrality of the web and one that can jeopardize the mobile web as a platform in the years to come.

To this end, mobile developers of various nationalities and background, assembled on the WMLProgramming list at Yahoo Groups create this manifesto to make their position known in the face of those who try to misrepresent the needs and the wishes of the mobile ecosystem for their own petty monetization needs.

If you want to sign, drop Luca an email with your name, title and company.

From : Luca Passani passani at eunet dot no

Much noise has been circulating about Google jumping into the mobile business… well now things are getting more precise. Here is their scoop from their blogs and from their video cast that you can find below. Briefly Google purchased a company called Android in mid 2005. Android’s idea was to make a open software platform based on Linux that would compete with Windows Mobile, RIM’s Blackberry and Symbian and that would be easy to use and free to use. The idea is to set a universal norm so that when developers make applications for mobiles they don’t have to port to each and every mobile device.

Of course that is the stated reason.. or lets say the nice reason, the Google reason is to power the search and the ad revenue that the wireless market has the potential of generating.

To make all of this palatable for handset manufacturers Google has founded the Open Handset Alliance and brought on board key players in the industry with people like Samsung, Motorola but also key telcos like Telefonica, Sprint and NTT DoCoMo.

So if all goes according to plan, there will be lots of phones based on the Open Handset Alliance, running Google-based services. Handset maker HTC, previously wedded to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, has promised to deliver Android phones.

Here is what the Android/Google team has to say about their endeavor. Whatever said and done they look like they’re having fun :

AdMob has released their metrics of who visits in terms of countries and regions as well as what handsets generate traffic on their ad serving network. This data is particularly interesting because the vast majority of AdMob’s traffic is off deck and so the target of the members of MobilOpen.org.

This snapshot of mobile data talks for itself :

The numbers for the devices have a few surprises too :

What isn’t said here is also of key interest :

Three of the top five devices in the US are Smartphones (BlackBerry and Blackjack).

The iPhone is already generating meaningful mobile web traffic.

To get the full report just click here :