I'm sitting in the railway station / Got a ticket for my destination
On a tour of one night stands / My suitcase and guitar in hand
And every stop is neatly planned / For a poet and a one man band
Homeward bound / I wish I was homeward bound...
-- Simon & Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound," 1966
Even though this song is four decades old, it still rings true for me. Substitute "airport" for "railway station" and "phone" for "guitar," and Paul and Art's timeless classic could be referring to a lot of us. In fact, sometimes I catch myself humming that tune during my travels for Interwoven.
As a 21st century road warrior, I spend a lot of time with my Blackberry. My wife refers to it as my "mistress" since the device supposedly gets more attention than she does. Such is the curse and the blessing of today's technology to enable secret and obsessive rendezvous to check email whenever and wherever. I love that I can have a mobile email/web/GPS/text/phone/address book/to-do list/calendar/gaming device that is with me all the time. How else would I know how to avoid traffic on my route home or keep myself busy while waiting somewhere during my travels?
For the past 10 years, pundits have proclaimed the next year as the "Year of Mobile." And if you look at the rate of growth of mobile devices in the U.S., one could argue that every year has indeed been that. Forrester Research estimates that four out of five households in North America have a mobile phone, with most having more than one. In addition, half of all subscribers now use text messaging, more than one-third use picture messaging, and more than one in six accesses the internet via phone.
However, the shouts of "Year of Mobile" got louder with the release of Apple's iPhone. Many have said that because phones (including newer ones from Blackberry, Samsung and HTC) can now roughly simulate the PC browsing experience, the mobile challenge is over. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is based on a faulty premise -- that businesses' challenge in delivering mobile content and applications is purely a formatting one.
Indeed, the phone's smaller screen (and often lack of full keyboards and pointing devices) presents the web designer with a challenge. But the common wisdom says that the iPhone solves this problem by doing the hard work required to make your website "fit" and be navigable on that smaller screen. Of course, it's not accurate to assume that everyone will have an iPhone-like browser on their phone. Even according to optimistic estimates, that is many years away. But even if it were true, we would still be missing the second -- and larger -- mobile challenge.
Formatting challenges might help explain why only one in six Americans use their mobile phones for internet browsing. While certain applications are seemingly standard (email, texting, voice and PDA), the mobile browsing experience in the U.S. has lagged behind. Certainly part of this can be explained by poor bandwidth and slow-loading sites -- the U.S. is a relative laggard compared to many parts of Europe and Asia with respect to network standards, bandwidth and availability. In addition, many users outside the U.S. will only experience the internet through their mobile devices.
But, I believe, the larger issue here is that website owners do not understand their mobile visitors and the context in which they find themselves. When I visit sites on my Blackberry (or any mobile device), I'm telling the websites' owners that I'm probably not in front of a PC. After all, who in their right mind would use their phone to surf the web if a PC was readily available? Therefore, as a mobile visitor, I've just given marketers some incredibly valuable information about myself -- that I'm mobile! I could be in an airport, a car, walking down the street or in the lobby of an office I'm visiting -- but in any case, I'm signaling that I have different needs due to my physical location.
In this article, I'll take a look at consumers' unique demands for mobile websites, as well as what marketers can do to meet these demands.
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