Mobile Internet - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 279

Figure 2. Different views of the same service on mobile devices

help developers to build full Web sites that also
work well on mobile browsers (Sounders and
Theurer 2008).

applications can support the upload or download
of content to and from the Internet. The Web
access can either be an integrated functionality
in the phone's native applications (such as the
calendar, photo gallery, music player, or phone
idle screen) or it can be a stand alone application
downloaded from the Web. These downloadable
applications can access specific data from a phone;
the applications connect to a specific site for a
specific information query or task. For example,
they may be used for uploading photos to a photo
blog or downloading a game to a mobile phone.

Mobile-Tailored Browser Access

Tailoring Web content for mobile phones can be
done in different ways, as Figure 1 shows. Users
can obviously access Internet content with a mo-
bile browser, and open websites that are tailored
for mobile phones. That is not, however, the only
way to tailor Web content to mobiles: users can
have an applications or applets that access Inter-
net content without opening a browser. Figures 2
B-D show how the Share on Ovi service can look
on mobile devices: Figure 2B shows the mobile-
tailored browser view. It does not really matter to
users if the mobile tailoring has been done with
a markup language designed for mobile devices
(e.g., HDML, WML, cHTML, or XHTML) or
standard HTML. What is important is that the
content and UI is tailored to suit the mobile use.

WHAT DO PEOPLE DO WHEN
BROWSING ON MOBILES?

Mobile browsing has become more common in
recent years. Strategy Analytics (2008) estimates
that the global number of mobile Internet users
will exceed 400 million users by the end of 2008.
The growth of the user base has influenced the
topics of recently published papers. The number
of papers that focus on analyzing empirical data
on user behavior has increased. In previous years,
the papers focused on how to make the user in-
terface easy and consistent; now the technology
is mature, studies are tending to focus on what
people do and why.
Taylor et al. (2008) studied 11 mobile Internet
early adopters in the U.S. They used user feedback

Client Based Access

The other way of tailoring Internet content for
mobile consumption is to develop applications
that access the Internet. Figure 2C shows how
service content can be visible on a phone's home
screen, and 2D is an example of a downloadable
application that can access an online service. Phone