Mobile Web

We got inklings of Google's master plan to rule the universe. The first volley was the Google Chrome browser so they could deal with web services their way. Next came Android because they wanted to deal with mobile devices their way. Google also made a tiny detour to try to fix Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser by providing a plugin to embed a Chrome browser in IE when IE wasn't up to the task of doing what they wanted. Google showed its full hand (I think) yesterday by formally announcing and showing Google Chrome OS.

This super-focus on web pages will, I think, become a problem for Google shortly. The interesting, but somewhat oddball update...

New Google News for mobile

You know the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" Well, if all you have is a web browser, everything looks like a web page. And, this just ain't gonna work in the long run. The situation we're in now is similar to what we saw in the early 1990s when the computer world was in a painful in-between stage between single tasking MS-DOS and the fully GUI (or mostly so) multi-tasking (kind of sort of) Windows 95. There were some really wild attempts in between DOS and Windows to shoehorn character-based windows and memory managers that simulated multitasking or at least trying to allow multiple applications to be loaded at the same time in DOS. The tiny UNIX/Linux/X11 world had mostly figured this out even then. But, the vast majority of people struggled without looking to that solution.

We're going to muddle through all this confusion for the next few years. Hang on for a rough ride.

Queue up Queen's classic foot-stomping "Another One Bites the Dust" because TechCrunch says...

Yahoo Go Is A No Go

Yahoo! Go is a multi-smartphone-platform app that tries to bring various Yahoo! services to the smartphone's small mobile screen. It is one of those products that I wanted to see succeed mostly because I was such a fan of Yahoo!'s original WAP (plain text) mobile friendly website. Yahoo!'s mobile web site was my primary daily mobile web destination for news for years. So, it seemed like Yahoo! Go should be its natural successor. I even it gave it a good positive spin when I wrote briefly about it in this article for Microsoft.com a few years ago...

Plug into the wireless world: Introduction to connected applications

And, I really tried to like the extremely sluggish 3.0 beta release last year in this personal blog note...

Yahoo Go 3.0 Beta Earns a Tentative Thumbs Up

If you enjoy using Yahoo! Go, you can keep using it until January 12, 2010 12am (midnight) Pacific Standard Time.

I learned from LifeHacker that...

USPS Mobile Tracks Packages from Your Cellphone

USPS' (United State Postal Service) mobile friendly website is found at...

http://m.usps.com/

The timing of gaining this knowledge was timely for me personally. I learned that a package mailed to me with tracking information is listed as delivered although I did not receive it. Thanks USPS! Sheesh...

And, oh yeah, as LifeHacker notes, whoever designed the mobile page for USPS didn't fit it quite correctly for mobile devices.

A frequent topic of mine this time last year was "mobile friendly websites". These were generally mainstream well-known websites that had recently started detecting mobile device browsers and provided a version of their site that rendered better on mobile devices. I rarely write about this topic now because most of the sites I frequent either have provided a mobile friendly view for months or have provided a custom iPhone app for its mobile face.

My personal blogs are not exactly well-known sites. But, I've been annoyed that the WordPress plugin I had used for a year or two stopped working some months ago. While reading this item in ReadWriteWeb...

Blogs on the Go: WordPress.com Goes Mobile

I read that blogs hosted directly on WordPress.com now have a mobile theme turned on by default. My personal blogs aren't hosted on WordPress.com, but the article mentioned a plug-in I had not heard of previous: WPTouch. I installed it on my self-hosted WordPress blog and you can see the result in the screenshot above. So, a guy who writes about mobile technology all the time finally has a personal blog that is mobile friendly again.

Google continues to enhance the mobile web experience...

Introducing Search Options for mobile

This search options enhancement, however, is limited to the iPhone, Android smartphones, and the Palm Pre (webOS). Symbian S60, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile smartphones and their users are left out in the cold. You can see the kinds of search options available on an iPhone or iPod touch in the left screenshot above. Running the same search on a Windows Mobile smartphone (an HTC TyTn in this case) results in an option-less search result.

Google's search options let you filter searches by categories (e.g., only discussion forums) or time and can be quite handy to narrow search results. However, unless you have one of the favored mobile platforms, you won't have access to this new feature.

Users of the unfavored platforms (Windows Mobile, S60, BlackBerry) might want to try the Bing mobile search site at...

m.bing.com

It doesn't have Google's search options feature. However, Bing does autocategorize search results into categories such as web, images, news, and products.

Way back in June, I wrote...

Flash 10 Coming to Mobile Phones in October: Slow Heavy Mobile Flash Ads to Follow?

It looks like Adobe is close to making good on their promise. According to paidContent.org...

Adobe Extends Full Flash To Just About Every Phone But The iPhone

paidContent reports that Adobe will announce its availability for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS later this year with public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS early in 2010.

I'm not looking forward to seeing heavy (lots of bits) slow Flash based mobile websites appear anytime soon. And, I'm guessing that AT&T Wireless' network managers live in fear of Adobe Flash web pages further saturating a network already overwhelmed by iPhone data traffic.

I would gladly trade never having Flash for the iPhone if AT&T would provide 3G tethering :-)

iPhone users don't know how lucky they are to have had a single App Store to turn to in their quest for apps. Users of other mobile phone platforms have spent years wandering the web and getting pointers from friends on how to find an app that might do something interesting for them.

In the rare case when a site (usually a content rich one) actually has an app for that site (say Facebook or Skype), it is usually impossible to navigate the non-mobile friendly site to find the correct download for your specific phone. Getjar has a solution for this problem...

Help users get the right app with App Download Pages

Their App Download Page service provides a way for web developers to identify a mobile device and provide the correct app to download and install. Facebook is the first to use this service. And, as you can see in the screenshot above, after logging in to Facebook, it correctly identified my HTC TyTn (a Windows Mobile smartphone) and provied a link to download the appropriate installer.

Good job, Getjar!

Via: Facebook Users Download 1 Million Mobile Apps A Week—With The Help Of GetJar

Hyper-local is the new search goal: What's around me? The enhancement to Google's Local Search for Mobile (U.S. & China only right now) lets you mark important items ("star" it) to mark it for future use.

Introducing the new Local Search for Mobile

Local Search also provides a large set of categories and sub-categories for things around you to let you browse around the local area without typing anything. You can see part of the top level of categories in the screenshot above.

I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far of this Local Search enhancement. It definitely gets a mobile thumbs up of approval (and thanks) from me.

YouTube video courtesy of GoogleMobileBlog

Wunderground iPhone formatted site

We've got a bit of rain and wind heading to my part of the world (remnants of a fizzled hurricane). There's certainly no shortage of weather info for the iPhone. But, I wanted more information than three free (and very good I should add) apps I have installed: AccuWeather, WeatherBug and The Weather Channel. I've been looking at the Wunderground.com (Weather Underground) site recently because of their easy to find detailed information and maps. Wunderground does not have an iPhone weather app. But, they had a mobile friendly website when I checked them out during last year's hurricane season. So, I took a look to see what they have in the way of mobile friendly information this year and found they have two mobile friendly sites.

i.wund.com

...is formatted specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch. It renders reasonably fast and provides a lot of basic weather inforamtion on a single page. It basically looks nice and provides what 90% of people want to read 90% of the time. But, I'm in the 10% group that wants a bit more. Surprisingly, I found a lot more at Wunderground's generic mobile friendly site found at...

m.wund.com

Wunderground generic mobile friendly site

This generic mobile site provided what seems like a lot more inforamtion and what looks like near complete access to charts and graphs from the conventional website.

According to the YouTube blog, YouTube just became more mobile friendly...

YouTube Gets Smarter on the Small Screen

Just point your mobile browser at...

youtube.com

...and you'll be redirected to a mobile optimized website. You won't get the full desktop experience, but you can login to your account (something the iPhone YouTube app can't do) and see your own videos (with view counts), favorites, playlists and videos published by accounts/channels you subscribe to.

This is definitely a welcome enhancement for YouTube video addicts.