Web for mobile research

Posted on March 21, 2009

Mobile Social Networks Popularity

Currently (2009), mobile social network users are less engaged than their PC counterparts, using their phones mainly to check messages, comments and updates, reports ABI Research, who found that 60 percent of mobile users do primarily this, while only 30 percent upload photos.

While mobile social networking is more popular than some other mobile uses, like watching video, it is less popular than most other options. The highest percentage of mobile users use their phones for searches, local or otherwise. Other popular uses include searching for movie or entertainment info, instant messaging and searching for restaurant and bar info.

Flash Lite Support

What issues are there with providing web content for all handsets?

Screen size – The common upper limit on screen width resolution is about 320px (some handsets can be higher, but are less common in the market).

Certain handsets may only be able to render images of specific formats. For example, the Motorola T720g can render GIFs and some Bitmaps, however JPEGs and PNGs will not work.

95% of mobile internet capable handsets in the market currently support CSS in at least a limited set. However, even something as simple text alignment has limited support. For example, the handset with the highest amount of worldwide sales ever, the Motorola V3 series, does not support aligned text entirely.

Animated GIF support is also moderate in today’s mobile market. Unsupported handsets will only show the first frame of an animation.

Javascript support varies widely. While devices like the iPhone or the G1 support the latest javascript, including objects, they still only represent a small amount of mobile internet users.

Although 3G is becoming more prevalent, current GPRS rates still make the user wait quite some time for pages to be downloaded. Page sizes should be under 10K per page including CSS, but excluding images.

Mobile devices often have only a very limited keypad, with small keys, and there is frequently no pointing device. This makes input more difficult compared with using a keyboard.

Because of the limitations of screen and input, forms are hard to fill in. This is because navigation between fields may not occur in the expected order and because of the difficulty in typing into the fields.

Mobile browsers often do not support scripting or plug-ins, which means that the range of content that they support is limited. In many cases the user has no choice of browser and upgrading it is not possible.

Sources