Category Archives: Mobile

Mozilla Finally Goes Mobile

It was announced on Mike Schroepfer’s blog – Mozilla Corporation’s vice-president of engineering – today that they have finally decided to develop a mobile version of the most popular open-source web browser.

Schroepfer explains that many reasons motivated Mozilla to create a mobile browser: more and more people access the web from a handheld device; users want a a full browsing experience; most phones will have enough memory to be able to run a first-rate browser; etc.

I look forward to using Mozilla on my mobile, if they provide something similar to what they do for desktops, this can revolutionarize the way we browse websites on the go.

Mobile Web Community Still Angry At Vodafone

Luca Passani, the man behind WURFL, came up with a long rant (entitled “Vodafone UK is abusing its position) about Vodafone regarding their transcoding solution used in the UK(powered by Novarra), which reformats ALL sites visited by their users, and therefore masks the User-Agent. This is causing issues for mobile sites that rely on user agent to provide the right content to the device that requests it.

For example, here’s a regular HTTP request sent by a Nokia 6288:

HTTP_USER_AGENT => Nokia6288/2.0 (05.92) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1
HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE => “http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/N6288r100.xml”
HTTP_ACCEPT => application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc, text/vnd.wap.wml, application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html, multipart/mixed, */* HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET => ISO-8859-1, US-ASCII, UTF-8; Q=0.8, ISO-10646-UCS-2; Q=0.6
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE => en
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING => gzip, deflate
HTTP_CONNECTION => Keep-Alive

This is a standard HTTP request format containing the standard HTTP_USER_AGENT string.
Now here’s what the HTTP request looks like with a Nokia 6288 used through Vodafone UK Network:

HTTP_USER_AGENT => = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 MG (Novarra-Vision/6.1)

HTTP_ACCEPT => text/html;q=1.0, text/css; q=1.0, application/x-javascript; q=1.0, text/plain;q=0.8, application/xhtml+xml;q=0.6, application/x-httpd-php;q=0.1, */*;q=0, image/gif; q=1.0, image/jpeg; q=1.0, image/png; q=1.0

HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET => ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE => en HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING => identity;q=1.0, gzip;q=0.1, *;q=0

HTTP_X_NOVARRA_DEVICE_TYPE => 0

HTTP_X_DEVICE_USER_AGENT => Nokia6288/2.0 (05.94) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

HTTP_X_MOBILE_GATEWAY => Novarra-Vision/6.1 (VF-UK; Server-Only)

HTTP_VIA => HTTP/1.1 glgwsl11 (XMG 724Solutions HTG XMG-31_VODAFONE_M3_B030 20070724.091400), 1.1 Novarra (Vision/6.1), 1.1 frankenstein1:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE9-20070214)

HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL => max-age=259200

HTTP_CONNECTION => Keep-Alive

You see what’s wrong? Because the page you’re visiting is served by Novarra’s platform, the original user agent is lost. So if you receive a visit on your mobile site from a Vodafone UK customer, there’s no way for you to notice it since the user agent is masked.

Thankfully, there are workarounds for this issue. If you look at the HTTP Request you will see this field: HTTP_X_DEVICE_USER_AGENT, which contains the actual mobile device’s user agent.

It is also possible to be whitelisted by Vodafone, if you have a mobile site and don’t want visitors from Vodafone UK to see a transcoded version of your site, you need to let Vodafone know (send an email to whitelist@vodafone.com , but due to the amount of requests, it may take time before they include you in their whitelist).

So, you may ask, if there are workarounds to this issue, should we still complain? The answer is YES. People active in mobile commerce, mobile web, mobile content delivery etc must make sure that third parties do not change the way their site is supposed to work, because this is going against standards and it is not fair for both users and sites’ owners (who are of course losing money when that kind of issue arise).

Google Officially Launches Adsense For Mobile

We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here. Google just announced that Adsense will be availalable for Mobile. Mobile sites owners will now have the possibility to display Adsense ads and will be paid per click.

Google Adsense will directly compete with AdMob, which is currently the leader in this arena. Let’s see how long they will remain at the top…

AdSense for Mobile will be available in : US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

TeaShark – New Mobile Browser

Russell Beattie just spotted a new mobile browser called TeaShark. The site was down when I tried to visit it, so I wasn’t able to discover the features of this browser, or know more about people behind this new project.

According to Russell, TeaShark is a Java application based on WebKit. Russel posted a link to a YouTube video of this new browser and it does look impressive.

TeaShark seems to allow to view web pages from a mobile the same way than from a desktop browser.

TeaShark reminds me of Microsoft’s Deepfish, which also has a zoom-able interface.

I Was About to Buy a Wi-Fi Phone and a New MP3 Player…

…but Apple just came up with their new Ipod touch. Good job, Steve, you’ve finally convinced me to buy an Ipod.

I was indeed looking to get a Wi-Fi capable cell phone to allow me to check my emails, read feeds, or check out Digg while on the go but without ruining myself with huge data costs. Plus, I live in Paris and there are more and more Wi-Fi spots here.

It was also the time for me to get a new MP3 player, since my old but cool 512MB Samsung YP-T7 Player (I love the fact that it’s so tiny!) can’t hold lots of albums.

Since the Ipod touch is Wi-Fi capable and has a 8GB or 16GB storage capability (which is more than enough for me), and is priced at $299 and $399, well, this gorgeous thing will be perfect for me.

I’ve also noted in the online presentation that the Ipod touch has a shortcut to Google. With this kind of partnership, Google has just won millions of wireless users of their search engine.

Google Phone “Confirmed” – Will Be The Computer For The Poor

Finally, someone posted something that looks like a reliable confirmation of the coming release of the Google Phone. Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, a technology podcaster, says that one of his inside sources over at Google confirmed that a phone was about to be launched, and gave him more details on its features.

According to Rizzn’s source, Google doesn’t plan to create an IPhone killer, but rather a $100 Laptop killer. By providing a phone with embedded applications, Google hopes to fill the needs of people who don’t own a computer and offer them an Internet access.

He said that the Google (applications) Suite is going to play a huge role in the usability of the GPhone, and the thought process behind it’s functionality is less about beating the iPhone and more about beating the $100 Laptop, which provides a huge clue behind what will be the pricing structure on this.
Mark believes that the GPhone will be sold at a very low price, and that Google will make its money with advertising. I agree. Google is not a hardware company, it’s an advertising company and this phone will be a way for them to make more money in the growing mobile search/advertising field.

Remember that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said last year that they would provide free phones to people if they accept to view advertising.

Fierce Mobile Content also reports that Google is in discussion with Indian mobile operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar to launch the device in early September.

By targeting that kind of area, Google hopes to gain more users of their search engine from people who don’t have a desktop computer.

So, with a phone, a mobile search engine with mobile content search, a mobile billing solution, Google will be all set to maximize its mobile search revenues.

Be ready to see some fierce battle between Google and mobile networks in the coming months.

More Details on Yahoo!’s Deal With Novarra

I recently had the pleasure to speak with Simon Hunt, Novarra‘s CTO. The goal of my phone call was to know more about the the deal they signed with Yahoo!. Novarra will automatically repurpose websites that are part of Yahoo’s OneSearch results.

I was quite worried when I heard about the partnership, since I didn’t want to experience the same issues than with the Vodafone UK case (which is now partly solved). I then contacted Novarra to get more details. Simon Hunt immediately got back to me and replied to the questions I had.

– Yahoo OneSearch provides two kind of results: traditional web results, and mobile web results. The good news for mobile commerce sites is that Novarra won’t transcode sites from the mobile web results.

– Only sites from “web results” will be transcoded. However, not all web sites have to be transcoded. If your site is properly coded, it doesn’t have to be transcoded to render properly on a handheld device.

Novarra stated that they have created a W3C Content Transformation task force, whose goal will be to work closely with the W3C in order to improve their service, and find signals on web sites that indicate that they do not need to be transcoded.

The team will operate publicly so that people that are active in the mobile web community can provide input.

I’m really glad to hear about the efforts made from Novarra, and wish them good luck in their endeavors.