The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet, part 2

Over a year ago I wrote about how people want their mobile phones to render web pages just like their computer browsers. At the time the iPhone was pretty much the only phone doing a good job of this. Other cell phone manufacturers were delivering a huge range of mobile browsers that were often very limited and varied widely from phone to phone.

What a difference a year makes. Now virtually every smart phone has a competant web browser built in, most of which are using the same rendering engines as desktop browsers. Gizmodo recently tested the major cell phone brands out there including the iPhone, Android, LG Dare, BlackBerry Bold, Nokia E71 Symbian S60, Samsung Instinct, and Samsung Epix Windows Mobile 6.1 (with IE and Opera). While there was variations in speed and some rendering problems all of the phone did a good job rendering pages with one exception: Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1. Gizmodo gave IE a failing score on every test and a score of "Utter Fail" on four of the seven tests. Hopefully Microsoft will rectify their poor performance with Windows Mobile 7.

These testing result are a big win for web developers who can now focus on make pages that work on major desktop browsers and not worry about the chaotic mobile browser environment that characterized the industry last year. It's also a huge win for mobile phone users who can surf the web from the phones with confidence.

Amazon Launches Content Delivery Network

Amazon launched its CloudFront content delivery network today. This is alternative to services such as Akamai at a lower price.

Content delivery networks are a great way to serve up large files such as videos and downloads from your site that might overwhelm your servers or exhaust your bandwidth otherwise. Viral marketing campaign materials are also a great choice for content delivery networks as they can have huge spikes in demand and these services can scale up to handle the demand much easier than your web server. Your files are served up from Amazon's servers instead of your own and you pay for the bandwidth at a rate of 9 to 17 cents per gigabyte.