1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

Two requirements need to be met before browser based technologies are capable being a general replacement for applications:
1. They need to be functional offline. The ability to edit a document can’t depend on the availability of a network signal.
2. There needs to be access to core phone features like the phone book, calendar, camera and location.

Those requirements are also valid when you are considering developing a mobile application and you are hesitating between developing a mobile web application or a native application. To which I would add two other points…
3. Needs of updating the application. Mobile web app are much more easily updatable. It takes much more time on a native application.
4. Portability on any device. When well done, a mobile web application can be accessible from the begining to almost any mobile device. Ain’t true for native app obviously.

To sum up… things to think about when developping a mobile web app. vs. a native app:

1. Offline feature.
2. Accessing core feature of the phone.
3. Ease of update.
4. Portability on any device

I’ll end with a quote from Cameron Moll on Twitter:

…and the more I’m convinced well-done mobile web apps pretty much negate the need for iPhone installed apps that do the same.

From the descriptions of most of them [read: applications], I’d say there’s a ton of unmitigated crud flowing into the App Store right now. You don’t read about it because the iPhone is all shiny and new, but with all those apps arriving daily the quality has to be really varied. Really, really varied. And with a few of the App developers making BANK to the tun of a quarter million in like two months, it’s just going to get worse. The sort of press those successes generate may not be good for Apple at all in the long run, as it appears the land-rush is on, and the scammers, spammers and other dregs of online society are closing in fast and I have serious doubts if the iTunes Store is really made to keep up.

+10. Exactly what I thought… to which I would add two things:

• On the down side,… from what I have seen, a good number of the app could also be done as mobile web application and not stand alone application. It would not require the developer to pay the SDK license and more importantly, when done it right, they would reach then all smartphone (ie. mobile phone with a recent/decent browser) and not only the iPhone.
• On the bright side,… I like the way my iPhone tells me when an app needs to be updated. This is made easy by the fact that it is centralized (and closed) but I guess it would be possible to integrate this feature on others platforms.

L’interface de Wikio sur iPhone est plutôt sympa, mais le problème rencontré par Wikio est le même que celui rencontré par tous les agrégateurs de contenu lorsqu’il s’agit de développer pour les mobiles (iPhone y compris), à savoir qu’ils ne peuvent contrôler que la source vers laquelle ils renvoient est adaptée à la navigation mobile. Ceci peut avoir un effet désagréable pour l’utilisateur (sur son portemonnaie et/ou son expérience utilisateur).
Une solution consisterait peut-être à insérer une page intermédiaire qui permettrait d’avertir l’utilisateur qu’il se dirige vers un site potentiellement non adapté à la navigation mobile et/ou proposer l’utilisation d’un transcodeur pour mobile (comme Mowser, Skweezer,…).

Traffic from the 473 publishers grew 104% from July 2007 to June 2008. This indicates that the mobile web more than doubled in 12 months ending in June 2008.

I found it only very recently about the mobile website of the swiss radio. Really neat! It has some iPhone look and feel, it is clean and does a good job at informing on a concise manner… what else asking ?
It even provides some show to be downloaded as MP3 (depends on the connection and make sure you have a good data plan if you are on your carrier network).

URL: mobile.rsr.ch or via the QR Code below

Swiss mobile web in the mobile web serie.

[...] Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays [...]

[...] By stripping down the Web site interface to the most basic functions, site designers can focus the user’s attention and offer relevant information without distractions. [...]

“By having fewer items to scan for on a small display, users can find what they want more quickly and can be more confident that they have made the right choice,” [...] “If you just put the juicy stuff up there it works better.”

With mobile browser getting the same capacity and features than a desktop one, I was really starting to wonder what was the need of dedicated mobile version. Main reasons are price, bandwidth, and usability. While price and bandwidth remain good reason for now I though that usability was going to fade away with the iPhone but it is the other way around. It is reinforcing the need of dedicated mobile version. Too bad it targets the iPhone only…

20minutes.ch has a pretty good mobile website (relaunched in august last year) with the latest news in a river of news format. If I had to guess I would say that it is based on RSS feeds generated by the “normal” web version. Useless in the train as you have already read the paper version :-) but it seems to be updated all day long. Service developped by MobileTechnics in Bienne.

URL: mw.20min.ch or via the QR Code below…

Today this message was not very helpful for me, I already knew I was over my quota but I wanted to know by how much… I just needed to know how much the service I am using is going to cost! Simple no ? I do not understand…

On a side note… I dislike the new Swisscom corporate branding.

Parlons Foot sur ton iPhone (fr)