On the brink of a mobile revolution

IT Week: As a partner and director of digital design company Fjord, do you believe devices such as the iPhone will push the mobile internet into the mainstream?
Christian Lindholm: We are living in a really interesting era. The axes of technology are coming together. I believe that the iPhone will force the industry to step up. That Nokia is looking at a touch screen user interface is a good indication that something is brewing. I see a lot of maturing technologies that will transform the user experience – we will soon see radically different mobiles. The size of the internet is A4, so you need a good panning experience [as with the iPhone]. Or one alternative is to squash the content into columns, which requires transcoding the pages for mobiles.

Is transcoding the answer?
You get very long pages, and there is the risk of editorial transcoding, because you risk messing with someone else’s IP [by rearranging content]. Then there is the problem of adverts – do you take them out to make the page easier to read? There are some good transcoding engines and it’s an interesting battlefield, but it’s hard to do well.

How do you view the lack of standardisation in the industry?
This is a huge barrier for content developers. If you think of the mainstream consumer brands, if they advertise a URL saying you can visit the site on your mobile, you can’t start to specify which handsets this applies to. You must design for all, which makes the design sub-optimal because it is limited [to the lowest common denominator]. Another way around it is to do what Google is doing and serve up different versions of your site depending on the quality and type of phone, with a high-end version for good phones. A 2in screen with 320x240 pixels and a full browser will produce a really good mobile site that is relevant and can be used.

Is this hindering take-up of the mobile internet and can .mobi help?
Users need a proper experience to get engaged and many have burnt their fingers before. Dotmobi is a good initiative in that they’re educating the industry and providing guidelines, but I’m not convinced that .mobi per se is the solution. I think that the whole concept of a URL is conceptually daft. Why even put a URL in when you can search?

What interests you most in the mobile web space?
You have got cameras and videos on mobiles now and the next thing in the internet space is GPS and maps. The acquisition of GPS
company Navtech by Nokia was mind-boggling. A notoriously acquisition-shy business shelling out $8.2bn is amazing, but it’s a fantastic asset to own.

About Christian Lindholm

Christian Lindholm is known as the Father of the Nokia Series 60 User Interface and is the inventor of the Nokia Navi-Key, one of the most deployed mobile user interfaces.

Prior to joining Fjord, Lindholm was at Yahoo, where he served as vice president of global mobile products.

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