PavingWays

We’ve been monitoring the mobile browser market pretty closely during the last couple of years, especially in regard to Mobile Ajax and how it could help to create new and powerful web applications for mobile phones.

Mobile Ajax is a lot of things and it always depends on the individual’s definition what is really meant, but one thing that is a pretty common aspect of Mobile Ajax is the ability that it might at some point be used as a gateway or API to connect the web browser on the phone with the device hardware, such as the GPS system thereby giving access to the device’s position within a mobile web application.

These things are in development at every mobile browser vendor today, that much is for sure, but what’s more interesting, because it’s hardly known, is that this functionality already exists on some BlackBerry Devices, namely those of the 8800 series! Now maybe we’ve been too busy developing our stuff lately to notice, maybe this time nobody really made a big buzz out of this, but personally I feel bad that I missed this until now, because I feel this might have a tremendous impact on mobile web application development:

As TonyB writes in an article called “Blackberry Browser & GPS” on his blog, certain BlackBerries provide a JavaScript object within the web browser that allows the web application to access latitude and longitude from the GPS module on the phone. Security is taken care of by asking the user to allow (or not) the application access to the physical location of the device in a Yes/No alert() window. Simple and, if it works, tremendously powerful!

Too bad BlackBerry devices are known for not having the world’s best web browser on them (to put it politely) - developer documentation seems not to be of much help either. But as results from our ever-running Frost library test show, there might be a BlackBerry device, the BlackBerry 8200 Cingular US (VendorID = 102), that already features support for Ajax. This could be a faked user agent string though, so if you have a 8820 and want to test it, just go to http://pwmwa.com/frost - or we can test it ourselves as soon as you send us over a BlackBerry 8200 ;) As we develop Groupile, we will make sure to include this as soon as possible too.

Please read all details and the code listing in TonyB’s article - thanks for blogging about this!

Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser

Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:

Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide

Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.

Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany

You can find more information and the whole report here: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report

While working on a couple of things we realized strange behavior in IE Mobile on a Windows 5.0 phone. It’s not really a big issue but it could lead to tiny hiccups for developers, so I felt like posting it here.

The issue occurs then POSTing a form (multipart/form-data) to the server (running PHP 5.x) which contains an input field of type “file” and you leave this file empty.

What you on the server side normally do is to read the form values submitted by the user through the $_POST and the $_FILES array (in PHP) and then do whatever you like with it. These arrays are populated by PHP with the values of the various input fields on your form, and inputs of type=”file” don’t appear in $_POST, but in the $_FILES array, any other input type’s value goes to $_POST.

Now as long as you fill in all field on your form everything is fine, and IE Mobile works as described.

BUT: While any other browser seems to not send empty inputs of type=”file” to the server at all, IE Mobile does just that AND it goes to $_POST causing you to have a key with the name of your input=”file” field with en empty value in the $_POST array after sending the form. This doesn’t hurt at all, but it is weird, especially because this ONLY happens if you leave the input=”file” form element empty.

While this is a bit strange, it’s not really a problem, maybe not even a bug, maybe not even against the standard (I didn’t look it up). After all, uploading files through a form on a mobile browser does not seem to be what many people do (although it works pretty well…mostly).

I totally forgot blogging about that and more or less for completeness reasons I want to mention that I have been attending the Google Android developer day in Munich (actually in Aschheim/Dornach) on January 29, 2008. I met Jason Chen, one of the presenters at the event, the day before at the Mobile Monday in Munich.

The people attending, at least most people I have been talking to, were mobile developers sent by their companies, pretty big ones. There were some start-up people there too, but not many. Comments and questions in general were pretty critical, detailed and practical. Interesting was the big interest of taking part in the Google Android development competition from the audience. Apparently mentioning 10 mio USD in price-money creates some interest ;)

I was of course mostly interested in the WebKit-based web browser in Android and I have to say it worked pretty well in the SDK emulator, it even has the same “bug” that I had experienced while testing the Frost library on the iPhone when it came out. So no surprises there too and one more browser to look at when developing mobile web apps, even though it’s almost the same browser as on the iPhone or Nokia’s S60 3rd edition phones (also exhibiting the “bug” mentioned above - so it’s apparently a WebKit issue after all).

Bottom line is: no surprises after all, Google leaves no event without mentioning that they’re looking for developers and if you’re interested in Android development, get the SDK and read the docs.

- Vodafone sued T-Mobile in Germany over its exclusive contract with Apple. That’s why Vodafone had issued a “restraining order” against T-Mobile for offering the iPhone exclusively. Another German carrier Debitel had also complained to the German telecommunications regulators about the exclusive deal (which ties the iPhone to a single carrier).
T-Mobile announced yesterday that they will now also sell the iPhone in Germany without the 24-month contract as well as without SIM lock. T-Mobile’s unlocked iPhones (without a contract) will cost 999 EUR (1473 USD).
Customers who sign up for a 2-year T-Mobile contract get the device for 399 EUR (588 USD) plus (at least) 49.99 EUR/month.

- The new version of the mobile Opera browser - Opera Mini 4 - was released on Nov. 7th and had already had over 1 Mio. downloads in the first ten days. Incredible! Congratulations to the Opera team!
Download Opera Mini 4 here: http://www.operamini.com/download/

Sources:
http://www.betanews.com
http://business.timesonline.co.uk
http://www.heise.de

Last week we attended the monthly held Mobile Internet SIG: Mobile User Experience at the ACCESS building in Sunnyvale. The event started at 6:30 pm with pizza and free T-Shirts and it was our first mobile-oriented event here in the Bay Area.After 30 minutes of networking with quite some interesting people, e.g. Dr. Paul James of Nokia Inc. (Nokia also sponsored this event), the presentations started. The first one was held by Sergei Krupenin, Director of Business Development at ACCESS. Sergei showed some interesting innovations which we will soon see in upcoming versions of the NetFront mobile browser:

• Smart Swing Navi: By using the captured image of phone camera, you can scroll or zoom contents by tilting phone vertically and horizontally.

• Visual Bookmarks: Visual bookmark helps you to select bookmarks by showing page thumbnail together with page title and URL.

NetFront also supports web standards for web applications. They developed a widget framework that supports the creation and use of dynamic Web applications based on open standard Web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript/Ajax - sounds familiar, but they actually showed a widget in action on a windows mobile device. It was quite impressive to see how the widget was launched from the top menu bar and then became usable on top of the currently open application. In this case an excel sheet, just like a widget should work. Here you can find some more info and pictures of the NetFront browser in action.

The second presentation was held by Deborah Johnson, Technology Manager at FrogDesign. She introduced her company and their Celltop technology, which enables users to access, manage and organize a wide range of information already available on their Alltel Wireless phones. Celltop is only available on Alltel phones, free-of-charge and features 10 “cells” that come pre-installed and via download. Each cell is a category- specific half screen comprised of graphics and text that provides shortcuts for wireless users to navigate through information and applications including: call log, weather, news, baseball, basketball, football, rodeo, stocks, text messaging inbox and ringtones.

Both talks were very interesting and caused a lot of questions. It is very interesting to see how slowly data plans grow in the US. Mobile internet still seems like being in its early stages to some extend around here. Also if you compare the numbers of visitors (it were about 30) to the ones of Web 2.0-centered events like geekSessions, you get this impression.

After all it was a great evening in a nice location and hopefully there will be more of those - thanks to ACCESS and SDForum!

The Mobile Ajax FAQ is created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger and is maintained at the Horizon Channel. We welcome comments and feedback at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com.This post has been moved to a page on PavingWays - the following questions link directly there.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.

In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous.

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Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!

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A little while ago Team IEMobile posted an interesting article on their blog about changes in the User-Agent string that is sent to the web server when the browser requests a document.
The browser of the Windows Mobile OS will undergo a rather radical change concerning this browser identification string that is often used by web developers to detect the browser in order to take advantage of it’s unique features. Unfortunately the schema of the User-Agent string was not clear to many website creators in the past. Even the MSN website had problems of detecting the mobile IE correctly.

The browser of current and older Windows Mobile versions sends two different User-Agent strings, depending on what platform the OS runs on:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176×220)

Unfortunately the User-Agent string may or may not contain certain parts, for example the resolution information or even the “MSIE 4.01″. Therefore the only sure shot you can have at detecting the older and current Mobile Internet Explorers correctly is by detecting both “Smartphone” or “PPC” and “Windows CE“.

However this will change with the new version of the browser that comes out on new devices sporting the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
For new devices the IE Mobile User-Agent string will look like this:

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Nintendo has finally announced the launch of the Opera web browser for the DS on October 6, 2006. In Japan the browser powered by Opera is already available (since July 24, 2006).

Taking advantage of the DS’ built-in Wi-Fi capabilities the browser allows the user to access the full internet, incl. webmail, online shops or secure bank websites. The browser will be sold as an optional DS card. Users simply insert the card into the Wi-Fi enabled Nintendo DS, connect to a network, and begin browsing on two screens. Users will also be able to apply an optional filter (provided by Astaro) that will block inappropriate content for underage surfers. The recommended retail price is around £30 / 40 Euros.

Take a look at the video review: http://www.gizmodo.com
or check out “Tips & Tricks” how to use the DS browser: http://www.opera.com

Sources:
http://www.nintendo-europe.com
http://www.opera.com

Last month I was sitting in the tube in London and saw an ad about ONSPEED Mobile. I have never heard about ONSPEED Mobile. So I was interested and started researching.

ONSPEED Mobile is a mobile web browser. There is a 14 day free trial, after that you have to pay £ 19.99 per year.
When you request web pages or images via the ONSPEED Mobile browser, it’s sent directly to ONSPEED’s servers where it is then reformated and compressed and then sent direct to your mobile phone. So, the website you visit is an optimised version for your mobile phone (sounds familiar?). The company promises to increase surfing speed by not less than (up to) 10 times and also to reduce the data traffic up to 75%.

The download size of the browser is less than 100KB, but your mobile phone must be Java enabled. You can check out if your mobile phone supports ONSPEED Mobile at http://www.onspeedmobile.com.
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