So, why is it that Canada is falling so far behind in terms of technology? We are so close but there is a choke hold on us in the form of infrastructure lease rates. IE, the people who made the cell phone infrastructure get to charge a base “piggyback” rate for competitive companies who want to use it. This is also true for Rogers. This causes a price floor, which in economics terms will drive the base price up.
Now, at the end of the day all I want to be able to do is have a new and more useful way to use technology, not a $200 bill for an unsuccessful attempt at checking hockey scores on my fricken phone with the stupid mobile browser where i’m spending $0.30 a kilobyte.
By now it should be a lot more main stream in my opinion. You should be able to flash up a list of clubs on your cell phone on a Saturday night and see quickly where all the action is, what the news is and where you can get five shots for the price of one. Mobile browsing should be quick and easy, not unbelievably expensive and therefore useless. There has not been a lot of development in this area despite the fact that so many people have the capabilities for using mobile internet on their phones. We have all had it for years; it’s that thing we ignore and have never used called, “browser” with a picture of the world or whatever that just gets ignored.
I myself have developed a couple small mobile sites and no, it’s not hard to do, it just has not been really accepted (altho Facebook has done a good job) by the mass business community. Text message marketing has been the newest and most useless form of mobile technology in the late. If I have to see another glomobi text message ad about sending jokes to my phone i’m going to vomit, and for what? $1.50 per day?? Geez people, get something useful to do.
There is another stumbling block which I came upon and that’s the wildly varying different standards for browsers on cell phones. As a developer it is a nightmare to make anything look standardized when every cell phone interprets things a little differently. I have tested various emulators and it is not impossible and with the newest versions of the browsers (especially on Windows Mobile Phones) you are able to do almost anything you can in a normal browser.
If you are a web developer, think of the possbilities of having wap.yoursite.com and having people be able to check news and events or even search online in a mobile fashion for your phone number while roaming around. I can think of many great usages for this and in the near future I hope someone comes up with something good. I myself will be playing around and pitching various solutions to my clients, while trying to keep up to date with the developments for CSS and the standards for mobile browsing.
Any suggestions, let me know.