The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet

Up until recently the world of mobile Internet access has been horrible. You generally had to use primitive browsers on cell phones that don't render pages anything like they appear on your computer. Seemingly each phone displayed pages differently making mobile development a very painful process. Most web developers avoided making mobile versions of their sites and most cell phone users failed to see any reason to pay an extra $30-40 a month for a data plan to suffer through this experience.

The verdict is in. People don't want this crippled Internet. They want the "real" Internet. They want pages that look the same as they do on their computer.

A number of recent devices are helping to make this possible. One of the biggest selling points of Apple's iPhone with includes a full version of their Safari browser. At the same time Opera is offering Opera Mobile and Opera Mini to give a full browsing experience to many cell phones.

Then earlier this month Apple released its iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone, it retains the iPhone's ability to surf the web on a full version of Safari over any available Wi-fi connection opening the door to many other mobile entertainment devices having full Internet access.

This trend is only going to gain strength as more and more devices add these capabilities and people are drawn to what we see. Just as TiVo users can't conceive of going back to a world without time-shifted TV, you won't be able to conceive of not being able to access anything on the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is the real mobile Internet that is just beginning to take off.

Silverlight Released

Microsoft released Silverlight on Sept. 4th. This "Flash-killer" from Microsoft has gotten a lot of press. Most of it has been focused on how it competes with Flash for the animation and graphical affects for which Flash is normally used on the web. In many ways I see this side of Silverlight being the least interesting and least chance of success for the tool. Flash owns this market and creative people gravitate to Adobe, not Microsoft, for creative tools. With every computer coming with Flash and Silverlight requiring and installation, I can't see Microsoft getting much traction for a long time to come.

I think this focus, however, misses the greatest potential of the technology, the .Net Framework that underlies the tool. While Adobe has tried hard to woo developers to its camp with increasingly advanced Flash development tools, they haven't had much traction. At the same time Microsoft has a huge percentage of the developer market with its .Net framework. Silverlight includes a major subset of the .Net framework, making Silverlight development an easy transition to .Net programmers. This along with the cross-browser/cross-platform nature of Silverlight (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari/Windows, Mac, and Linux) open the door to really powerful and sophisticated applications on the web. Everything from web based word processors and spreadsheets to sofficisticated airline booking systems and event registration systems could be built on such a framework with much more intuitive interfaces than are possible with even the latest AJAX tools.

There are still many challenges ahead for Silverlight including getting enough users to install it and the SEO and bookmarking issues that already affect Flash, but it holds some strong possibilities and is worth following.