Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

You’ll find a wide variety of pundits asserting that the future of mobile is the web. I only somewhat agree.

The future of mobile is a mix of person-to-person communications and access to on-device and off-device data, all through a variety of mechanisms. These mechanisms include browsers, local applications, synchronization, and widgets. Browser-accessed information will be a mix of mobile-optimized web pages and generic web pages (some of which may be primarily aimed at mobiles).

Offline access is critical to some situations. Consider this: at the doctor’s office, I need to schedule a new appointment. I have my calendar out. The woman at the desk looks at her information, and asks “Is March 18 okay with you?”. I want to be able to answer her question within 5-10 seconds. I can do it with a paper calendar. I can do it with a local calendar. I can NOT do it with a web calendar, not when I have to either type in the date or instead navigate to the date. Don’t forget that loading a page on most devices takes well more than 5 seconds alone. For this morning’s task, I could have answered that question within 18 seconds based on my current setup, but only because I already had the browser page pre-loaded, and merely had to navigate to the correct date. This is rather stressful when there are people behind me in line.

This is why Google’s product release last week is so important. Google now synchronizes Google Calendar with Blackberry. This is significant: my best mechanism prior to this was to use iCal to view Google Calendar, synchronize iCal with my Blackberry, view my calendar in Blackberry, then open up a web page to be able to add event. This morning was far better: I opened up the native calendar (1 second), navigated to the correct week (1-2 seconds), confirmed that the time was good and had started entering the new appointment (1 second). When I got to my desk, my event was sitting on my calendar.

There are limitations. For now, it’s only for Blackberry. Because Blackberry is built on a variant of Java ME, I expect the next set of devices will be those with the Java ME “PDA Profile” (that’s JSR 75), which allows access to the device’s address book and calendar. Those are a relatively small population of all Java devices, and introduce the problem of communicating which devices support the feature. Next, while Google supports multiple calendars, Blackberry has no idea that they exist. So Google sends down all the calendars you request, but new events go to your primary calendar. This is completely livable for most people.

In many ways, Google just made the Blackberry a very compelling platform for small businesses. While I don’t have (nor want) my Google contacts on my phone, I do have my oh-so-important email and calendar. The former is an application using local logic and presentation of remote data; the latter is entirely local with periodic updates. Oh, and I have a quite good maps application from them as well. This is the sort of “one web” I want to see. Not one type of web page.

I’m now waiting on a good RSS reader for my Google feeds. There is one that looks okay, but it (a) is $40 and (b) aborts on the install process.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Design, Java ME, Mobile applications, Mobile web, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.