Tuesday, February 06, 2007 Limpag: More rational mobile web By Max Limpag Celltalk
SNIPPETS OF DATA. An Associated Press report last week touted the use of “widgets” to improve Internet access on mobile phones. Widgets are programs and scripts that download snippets of data as needed by the application.
When widgets start, they don’t have to download a ton of data in order to operate, the program just checks for updates and then downloads the data for display. This method makes a lot of sense in mobile phones.
I believe, and I keep writing about this, that the best way to bring the Internet into the mobile phone is to configure it in such a way that it functions as a thin client in a server-side computing environment.
Simply put, make the cell phone function as a data (but only snippets of it) entry and viewing device and leave most operations to a server.
The mobile phone can never be a computer (as we know it today) even if every year, its processors get more and more powerful. The environment wherein you operate a mobile phone and the interface for entering data into it offers challenges different from that of a desktop or even a laptop.
E-MAIL. An example of this is mobile access to e-mail. For so long, I’ve been looking for a free service that can receive my e-mails, process it and then forward the message to my phone as a text message.
I spent weeks looking for such a service several years back. I even tried attaching my phone number to form an e-mail address, the domain of my phone carrier, to no avail. This apparently worked in several carriers abroad.
I eventually gave up. Now, I use GMail for mobile applications. It’s really a great mobile application, one that I’ve depended on a lot in these days of lousy Internet connection (caused by that earthquake in Taiwan).
GMail for mobile application is a model for software that works well on the small screen. The e-mail you read on your phone is also marked as read when you access GMail in your PC. If you use an e-mail signature, the message you sent from your phone also has that signature attached and yet you don’t see it when you compose a message in your phone.
GMail also replicates in your phone the e-mailing experience you have when you are using your PC.
These past weeks, I’ve been checking my mails more on my phone than my PC. This is because the Globelines Broadband connection I have at home is so slow that I’ve already read several e-mails in my K750i using a Smart Buddy connection before GMail opens in my PC (and it’s the basic view at that).
STILL USEFUL. Among the applications mentioned in the Associated Press report is a free service that processes emails and forwards it to mobile phones via text messages. The messages are “formatted to look as clean as traditional e-mail.”
This service will still be useful but coming months after Google released its free e-mail application, its thunder had been muffled. With the Google application, not only can you read, write and search through your e-mails, you can also view PDF files, photos and other documents.
The utility of the e-mail to text service, however, lies in its simplicity and the ability to push content. With GMail, you have to open an application in order to check whether you have new messages.
With the e-mail to text service, you’ll get alerted whenever you get new messages.
