I’m scheduled to give a presentation later today at the Mobile Web Americas conference here in Orlando on displays for Mobile Web applications, and I spent yesterday listening to reports of mobile standards developments, mobile web browsers, mobile search engines, mobile business models and mobile advertising strategies. Symantec has a mobile web security suite for the Windows Mobile platform and will soon come out with a version for Symbian.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

There’s general agreement that LBSs (location-based services) will be a big business opportunity, and one that’s getting a lot of attention is location-based search. That is, the phone knows where it’s located via GPS or other means, and tells you where the nearest ATM or cholesterol-laden hamburger can be found. The feeling in the mobile search community is that the regular Web is much better at finding a hotel in Hong Kong or an HDTV from a national retailer than it is at helping you find a near-by place to repair your shoes. The vision is that mobile search can plug this huge gap in the Net. A talk by Alex Muller, CEO of GPShopper, summarized the position well. It’s title? "The Future of Retail; Why Mobile Matters Most for Local Search." Of course, wireless providers have to convince themselves there’s a way to make money out of this, and that may be on the verge of happening.

Another Mobile Web app is geotagging, in which a location tag is automatically used in an application. One possibility is to label each photo taken with the handset’s camera with the GPS-derived location of the photo, and then place flags on a Google map to show where each photo was taken.

A recurring theme at Mobile Web was the gymnastics mobile browsers, such as Opera Mini, Bitstream’s ThunderHawk, Nokia’s S60, and Microsoft’s mobile browser, must perform to deliver versions of an arbitrary website to all devices. This was tied to a still somewhat controversial philosophical position: "There is only one Web." That is, a mobile device should be able to see all of the sites a PC can, and not be limited to sites designed specifically for mobile platforms and (perhaps) designated as mobile sites.

This philosophy grows out of the democratic founding principles of the Web and is consistent with an "Open Web" orientation, but the proponents of the opposite position are not (necessarily) greedy closed-web oligarchs. That opposite position is that the user’s experience will be better if he or she is not inundated with sites that can not be navigated conveniently on a mobile device such as a cell phone, or that simply look ugly. Those positions were starting points for several productive discussions and presentations at Mobile Web, but the debate and the evolution of compromise positions have been going on for some time.

At the heart of this debate, and of the ingenious developments of the mobile browser creators, is the difficulty of presenting full web pages on small displays. The new generation of mobile browsers do this remarkably well, but they are still dancing bears. It’s amazing that they dance at all, even if they don’t dance really well.

The problem is that with today’s mobile handset displays - and this year, for the first time, the display with the largest market penetration is, according to DisplaySearch, a 2.0-inch QVGA display - is that there just aren’t enough pixels and inches to go around for a fully satisfying web-browsing experience. Thanks to a lot of very good browser design and Mobile Web standards work, they do a lot of things well enough, but the experience would be better with more inches and/or more pixels.

We’re just at the beginning of this new episode in Web history. The percentage of Web-enabled phones in North American is miniscule, but Steve Jobs’ marketing brilliance with the iPhone and the iPhone’s display of full web pages is both rapidly increasing the number of web-enabled phones and kick-starting the U.S. market. As Nokia’s Craig Cumberland said here yesterday, Nokia had a phone with all the essential functionality of an iPhone months before the iPhone was introduced, but found it very hard to sell in the U.S. Apple has broken that log jam. Now, several handset manufacturers have iPhone competitors in development. And Blackberry and Palm have recently announced less expensive Web phones.

Well, if the 2.0-inch, QVGA, transmissive TFT-LCD isn’t enough for the long haul, what is? Several vendors have full 2.4-inch (and larger) VGA TFT-LCDs now. QVGA AMOLED displays are available and sizes larger than 2.0 and 2.4 inches will be coming next year.

If mobile Web browsing really takes off, it may increase the interest in cell-phone companion projectors using laser light sources. Just a few days ago at Pepcom in New York, TI showed a limited number of journalists a cell-phone technology demonstrator with the laser projector inside.

And it may help provide the strategic customer Polymer Vision has been looking for to help commercialize that company’s rollable active-matrix electrophoretic display.

As the Mobile Web gains more users, we’ll have to see what display enhancements are feasible for mobile handsets - and what users will be willing to pay for.

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