Mobile Browsing Info

According to Opera:
"More than 40 million phones were distributed with the Opera Mobile browser. The Opera Mobile browser is offered for more than 50 different phone models. More than 2.5 million downloads of the Opera Mobile browser so far this year."

According to Browser News:
"Few people use mobile browsers, e.g. with cellphones, but the numbers are growing fairly quickly. It is possible that, by 2008, site designers may have to seriously consider making their sites friendly to these browsers."

While the current numbers are small, as smartphones and pocket PCs become more available, Internet browsing will increase. This is not a guess. Just look at the number of people downloading tunes to their iPods and cellphones. Look at the numbers using text messaging, even in a moving car and dying for that temporary lack of forethought.

Add the capability of shopping from Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart, and other online stores and you have all you need to foresee a drastic increase in mobile browsing. The only thing that can hinder this growth is the lack of mobile friendly sites or mobile browsers that insist on special code standards for a site to be display on a device.

While some, with more patience than most of us, will gladly jump through hoops, scroll through 40 small screens of text, and use standard phone keyboards, most users will demand something more than a thumb for information input. So, new smartphones and pocket PCs must make data entry easier, larger screens with better color depth and resolution, and more memory.

What does all this mean? It means that mobile friendly sites MUST be created. A site designed to look well on a 1024x800 monitor cannot be viewed very well on a 340x240 screen. PC based web sites have can much more information and much more room to display that information. Mobile friendly web sites must be edited down so as to show only relevant facts and data to a mobile user.

Does this mean you should buy the new .mobi extension for your mobile friendly site or just add a mobile area to your existing .com web site? There are advantages to both approaches. If you decide to add to your existing site, you will have to detect what type device is coming to your site. Still, I would advise buying a .mobi extension so if someone does enters domain.mobi, they are directed to your site.

If the .mobi extension does catch on, mobile users will get in the habit of entering domain.mobi when using their smartphones and domain.com when using their home or office PCs.

Major search engines have special areas just for mobile device users and also special listings of mobile friendly sites. (See Wall Street journal report) By using the .mobi extension, your site will get listed in areas specifically for mobile sites. In fact, the search engines may well provide search results based on the device requesting the search. So, if a smartphone is searching for a book or clothing, they may be shown .mobi sites first.

If the big three search engines do this, then a .mobi extension is the way to go even if it only points to your .com site and then the user is redirected based on device detection.