Mobile web: so close yet so far [The New York Times]
An article in the New York Times cites recent surveys challenging the notion that smartphones are ready for primetime:
Surveys by Yankee Group, a Boston research firm, show that only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day.
“The user experience has been a disaster,” says Tony Davis, managing partner of Brightspark, a Toronto venture capital firm that has invested in two mobile Web companies.
While many phones have some form of Web access, most are hard to use — just finding a place to type in a Web address can be a challenge. And once you find it, most Web content doesn’t look very good on cellphone screens.
One of the major obstacles to the expansion of mobile internet is that most new users of mobile phones are in the poor countries – and who cannot read text (particularly if it is in an alien language). This is a challenge as well as opportunity for us to re-invent the internet itself based on non-textual cognition and information architecture.