Although I said this would be 1 minute, it’s actually 2! In fact I probably could have spoken for two hours about it as it’s going to be such an important platform/medium in the future. Already there are 2.7 billion mobile phone users in the world, against only 1.5 billion computer users (and computers have been around for twice as long)! Next year mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, Android etc) will outsell PCs globally.
Think about how your business might be able to adapt the style of your site for more optimised mobile use.
Hi Adam,
The difficulty tackling the mobile platform is handling all the different user agents. Even when writing sites that are compatible with desktop computers one has to test against IE (6,7, & 8), Firefox, Safari, Opera to name a few.
When developing for the mobile platform there are many, many more to deal with. I navigated to your site using my HTC HD2 mobile phone and was presented with the site as designed for the desktop because I assume that the Opera browser on my phone isn’t being detected as a mobile browser. This is a site that lists some of the common user agents http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html there are plenty here to deal with and many more that are actually in general use.
This is a very interesting topic and one that will become much more important as you rightly point out that people’s mobile devices will be used extensively in the coming years. The issue of dealing with different browsers on different mobile devices is unlikely to go away, sadly.
Thanks James, you are of course right, mobile development adds additional hurdles which need to be overcome. Your phone currently isn’t supported with the WPTouch theme (although iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm devices are), but I assume that this will be rectified, and will continue to be an ongoing development process by Brave New Code.
In the meantime, at least you (and all other Windows CE users) will continue to be able to see the usual desktop site… not ideal, but better than nothing!
Thanks for your comments.