After seeing the slides from the Webinar here, I was inspired to write about the mobile web here, regarding promoting more usage of the Mobile web...

The key turns out to be internet enabled applications that present the data you’re looking for on the small screen in an easy-to-use manner. An excellent example of this is the Windows Live Search Mobile application. It is so easy to use this program to access traffic information for your GPS location, find out weather information, look up movies, find restaurants, find locations (with voice recognition), etc. I’ve completely stopped using a web browser for those types of things. Heck, it’s easier than using a desktop computer!! There’s no way a web-based application could be made to be that easy. (Have you ever seen a web page that had voice recognition?)

It seems that’s where you’ll see increased mobile internet adoption the most… in the use of web-enabled applications that interact with the internet in their own user-friendly methods. You’ve seen the signs all around… Many Windows Mobile devices now include internet-updated weather reports on the home screens… There are social-website interaction applications floating around for Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Live Spaces, Twitter, etc… RSS reader applications make news sites much easier to read by cutting out all the desktop-designed fluff and getting straight to the content (provided the developers put the content in the RSS feed.)

Those types of information and interactive sites that you use every day will become standard mobile applications. Opening an old web browser on your phone will become very rare and unnecessary. With a good RSS reader and Live Search’s wealth of easy-access information, I rarely use it anymore anyway.

But what else is missing?

How about a decent Flash player? If you’ve used SkyFire, you’ll know that watching Flash videos embedded within desktop-designed web pages is hugely frustrating and practically unusable. You have to spend 5 minutes resizing and panning the video player around just to make it visible. That’s not easy. The video should open and play in its own mobile-designed application with mobile-designed keyboard shortcuts and controls. (The TCPMP & flashbundle method works this way for some Flash video sites already.)

How about a forum thread client? You know it’s a huge pain to write comments on news articles or add text to forum threads on a mobile device. You have to be online to do it, there’s no draft-saving capabilities, the formatting bar is all out-of-wack, you can’t easily switch between reading thread content and composing your reply, you have to scroll long distances to see the next page of a thread, and often the submit button doesn’t even work. Think about how much easier it would be if there was a standard application programming interface for all of these website forums. Easy-to-use mobile-designed consistent GUI applications could be designed to interact with these sites in order to drastically improve the mobile web experience.

How about a research application? Something that can easily search websites for answers to questions using voice recognition? It would have to interface with things like Wikipedia, About.com, etc., but imagine not having to type your research question and getting results sorted in a mobile-formatted easy-to-read manner.

How about an internet-connected language translator, again using a voice recognition engine? All of this would be a lot easier if Microsoft Voice Command had an API available for 3rd party developers.

Or how about a Calendar with GPS integration and live traffic knowledge like what we discussed here, and what ProxPro is working on.

What else do you still use a web browser for that could be better replaced with a custom application?

Great article Adam and I so agree. Mobile browsing is a sort of oxymoron. You want access to a load of information on a tiny screen. Doesn't make much sense! Applications that deliver simply just the data you want make much more sense. I think I would like to see a banking application.

Adam Z Lein:

a standard application programming interface for all of these website forums

Adam Z Lein:

a forum thread client

But how feasable is it? I don't know whether the forums use the same code for responses.

For example: Here, when you quote somebody, you can use "[ quote user=... ]" but there are other forums which can only accept "[ quote=... ]" where the addition of "user" causes the reply to crash.

If the AutoThreader is written for specfic forums, which you can choose from, and it then amended the code system accordingly, that would work. Or if it used just a base set of code which all of the forums would understand.
 

Laura Rooke:

I think I would like to see a banking application.

Yeah! That's a great idea too.  Remember when there was Microsoft Money for Pocket PC and you could sync with the desktop?  A banking program that could securely connect to specific banking websites would be pretty useful.

Biomehanika:

This has to be the best idea that I have heard in a long time. We already have similar apps for writing to Twitter.

 THANKS!!  :)

Biomehanika:

But how feasable is it? I don't know whether the forums use the same code for responses.

Yeah, it sounds like it would be difficult to make work for a wide variety of forums.  A lot of them seem very similar though. If the application was popular enough, they could promote compatibility by having the site providers add some code that could create a secure link between the application and the site's forum database.

It would be even cooler if the program could have collapsable nested threads so you could see who's replying to what. That would be so useful.

Adam Z Lein:

Yeah! That's a great idea too.  Remember when there was Microsoft Money for Pocket PC and you could sync with the desktop?  A banking program that could securely connect to specific banking websites would be pretty useful.

SplashMoney currently does this.