Whilst looking over the RSS feed of the Econsultancy.com site I noticed they has stuck up a mobile review of online film rental service LoveFilm.com and it got me thinking about how quickly mobile data services including web browsing have progressed on mobile devices compared to the evolution of the Internet on home computers. It’s only two years ago that you could only access text based pages on your mobile handset but with the roll-out of a 3G network we can now all view images, videos and richer pages (all commonly expectedby consumers).
I guess the mobile website tipping point was the release of the first generation iPhone, I use the lastest 3G version and it really has changed the way I access and actually use data. I’ve used Nokia’s and Blackberry’s over the last year to access online services and they both have lots of catching up to do. Yes you could argue that Nokia or Blackberry target different markets but the fact remains that people expect amazing useability and experience which is what Apple deliver with the iPhone.
Everyone keeps going on about how this is the year of mobile, I’m starting to agree although I’ve been very sceptical in the past. So much has happened in the past 12 months in terms of technology (iPhone), software (iPhone) and mobile networks that we are now setup for big things to happen. I still feel though that until the display advertising side of mobile websites is truley cracked we might just have to wait a bit longer. I’m sure though that we are getting close.
To end with I think we could discuss Google and their mobile ambitions all day but I think I’ll leave that for another post.
