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Mobile Web Americas (the mobile web is dead)

I attended this years Mobile Web Americas in Orlando. There are a couple of people that have written reviews, here is one. They had a good set of speakers but the execution of the whole event could be improved. Of course on the positive side, because the conference was small, you could approach any of the speakers afterward. That wouldn't be possible at a big show like CTIA.

One of the sessions was called "Meet the Browsers" where representatives from Nokia, Opera, Microsoft, and Novarra spoke. In general theme of the browser makers seemed to be: "just send us the desktop content and we will make it look OK on your mobile". In a lot of ways it seemed like they were saying "the mobile web is dead, just browse the web desktop page with your phone".

Of course that has to be their stance based on the products they sell. I don't subscribe to that line of thought because I believe in "context". When I'm mobile I don't necessarily want to see all the content that a full desktop page might offer. I'm not sure that line of thought would fit their product agendas. In addition they are all living in a world where everything is being compared to the iPhone. So it seemed like the party line was "I can browse a full web page just like the iPhone".

Craig from Nokia took a few jabs at the iPhone, some being valid. One of his jabs was that the iPhone has no GPS. In the context of LBS and the future of search this is important. If I could have made one humorous comment as a rebuttal, I would have said something like "yes iPhone 1.0 doesn't, but I bet one of the next versions will...." That is probably what has these guys a little shaken. The first release of a product from a newcomer in the device industry is "better" in many ways than anything we have seen from companies that have been around for years making handsets.

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