Category Archives: Mobile Web Development

T-Mobile’s DevPartner Program Live!

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It looks like T-Mobile USA has flipped the switch on their DevParner Community.  The program is designed to streamline the process of getting a mobile application approved and available on the carrier’s soon to launched App Store.   You will need to register as a developer to be able to see the the program’s documents which include detailed requirements for testing and certification and a rate schedule.  Registration is free but if you are a hobbyist or Open Source developer … Continue reading →

Mobile Browser Based Applications

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Last week at both Mobile Web Megatrends and the CTIA Mobile Jam Session a major theme using the browser and mobile web technologies as a replacement for Java, BREW and native mobile applications. Many of the developers attending both events who have been doing Java and native applications expressed frustration with the economic and technical inefficiencies of the mobile application model.  They mentioned platform fragmentation that requires hundreds of versions of an app to support even a fraction of the market, … Continue reading →

CTIA: Netbiscuits’ Mobile Web Developer Challenge

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Germany’s Netbiscuits seems to be one of the more prolific and successful mobile web development shops.  This year they built and are hosting three Yahoo Sports sites, March Madness, Beijing Olympics and the new Fantasy Football site launched last week.  In addition to Yahoo, Netbiscuits is used by eBay, AOL, Nokia, Land Rover, Germany’s BILD newspaper and Spiegel magazine, European TV conglomerate RTL, Japan’s toy and game company Konami and Sixt (a big European car rental company), 80% of the … Continue reading →

CTIA: dotMobi to Revamp Developer Site and More

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I had a long talk with dotMobi‘s Paul Nerger at CTIA earlier this week.  Paul is VP of Advanced Services and Applications which means he works with all the cool stuff that dotMobi is doing to help developers and publishers build better mobile sites more quickly and easily.  He filled me in on what’s happening at dotMobi which is really quite a lot. This coming Monday, Sept 15th, the developer portal dev.mobi, which hosts developer forums,  the devMobi blog and … Continue reading →

Serve Mobile or Full Content to Full-Web Mobile Browsers?

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The distinction between the mobile web and the “full” web is getting fuzzy. We have millions of phones running full-web browsers such as Opera, Safari, S60Webkit and NetFront that can display almost any web site.  Not only can these browsers handle JavaScript but the latest S60WebKit can play Flash .flv videos in the browser and it plus Opera Mobile 8.65 and 9.5 do a decent job with AJAX pages. Web developers should be asking “Which version of my pages should … Continue reading →

Put Your Mobile Site On Phone Menus

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I met Bill Scott, GetJar.com‘s VP of sales and business development, at CTIA. Bill showed me a rather clever way to promote a mobile site called Visual Bookmarks.  They are tiny (about 4KB for the Java version) Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry applications that do nothing but launch your site in the phone browser. So what good is a Visual Bookmark?  What it gives you is another channel  for driving mobile traffic to your site. Visual Bookmarks also have … Continue reading →

The “Real” Web on Phones and What it Means for Designers

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The mobile web is always evolving and one current trend is the rise of the full web on phone. By the full web, I mean being able to use any and all the web content available on PCs. It’s happening, thanks to better browsers and transcoders that can render almost any page on a phone screen. I’ve still believe that a made for mobile page will give a better user experience than a programmatic conversion of a page designed for … Continue reading →

Mobilize Your Blog With MoFuse

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MoFuse has opened up the Beta of their RSS to mobile service to anyone with a US mobile number. Go to MoFuse.com and enter your phone number to receive an invitation code. If you are outside the US let me know, as a user I have some invites to give away. I’ve used MoFuse to create mobile version of this blog, the URL is wapreview.mofuse.mobi. There are so many of these free services that let you mobilize any site with … Continue reading →