getting the Internet on the phone.

Nokia N95 - the flagship 3G phone with the Internet.

From 1990 it has been possible to see web pages on a mobile, the Nokia 7110 being one of the first devices. This was a very limited, even for those days, version of the web. Now with the latest iPhone or Android smartphone, a very sophisticated web is available on the phone, and by using a framework such as Bootstrap the pages are styled for the device. But currently we need to think about the device (Pc or Phone) and how to deliver an appropriate Internet on the device.

• In order to deliver some web pages to the mobile phone a whole new infrastructure of WAP and WML was developed. This was a lightweight system that worked on mobile phones delivering simple web pages on the mobile phone.
• With the introduction to more powerful mobile devices a new approach was required. Developers were not keen on the WAP solution with a serarate Internet on the mobile and on the PC. If we write using XHTML (XML comliant HTML) then this could be made to work on both devices. The same site on both devices. However various standards including XHTMP-Basic and XHTML-MP were developed to allow XHTML to deliver on the phone. None of these solutions become popular thus leaving the mobile web behind in development terms. The goal was to use the same HTML codebase to deliver the same site to a mobile as well as a desktop. With careful writing of the HTML this was possible.
• JQuery Mobile (JQM) was one of the first packages that genuinely delivered mobile web to the device. This became possible with the good and fast implementations of Javascript on the mobile device. JQM delivers a number of pages to the mobile device with local navigation between these pages. The default method of navigation in JQM is AJAX making for more efficient use of the Internet.
• Bootstrap and other frameworks claim to mobile first. The idea being that the site is written once and rendered differently, and appropriately, dependent on the device viewing the site. Using media queries, the same code base can be rendered appropriately as the device requires, with the data coming from the same codebase.
• Now we have achieved the aim of delivering the same site from a single codebase appropriately on any device.
• 2009 - The number of mobile access to the Internet out numbered the number of PC accesses.
• however this approach does not recognise the difference in characteristics between the PC or laptop and the phone. If the user loads a web site from a company, what they may want on a PC is different to that on the phone. Additionally on a mobile phone the user will want integration of various phone features not available on the PC. These include GPS, NFC, Orientation, Contacts, Fles, SMS etc.
• Rather than using a web site there is a move to applications that can integrate into the Internet to deliver the Internet experience on the mobiel

There are two ways to think of web development for the mobile and none-mobile devices :

• Write a single site using responsive design that renders appropriately for the device. This will deliver the same content to each device suitably rendered. Whilst this may achieve a mobile web site, it does not give a specific user interface for the mobile device
• Automatically detect the device type and swap to the most suitable version of the site. Usually a mobile and non-mobile site will be available. The former having mobile specific features including an appropriate set of features for the mobile user. But effectivly two sites need to be written.
• If the same information is to be provided on each device, then use responsive; if different features are needed then separate sites.