dotmobi

What is dotmobi

dotmobi is an ideal solution for retailers because they are not beholden to the internal politics of handset manufacturers, network operators, content providers, and increasingly the developers of phone applications. Now ordinary retail stores are pushing the market independent of what the mobile industry is saying.

We have seen multiple ways of getting information services on mobiles: WAP 1.x in 2001 was clunky, and was rejected by the market. With WAP 2.x some developers of WAP sites tried foolishly to replicate their Web sites, rather than seeing it as a new way for people to access "just the right information" quickly when on the move. Interestingly, the Japanese imode, WAPs Eastern cousin, has been more successful

The next big thing was J2ME (Java) and native apps running on midmarket handsets. Deploying applications to mobile handsets is challenge though. Every model handset was its own compatibility circus, and then you still need to persuade users to download the .jar Third party app developers wanting to do something more complex had to look to Symbian and Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Developing embedded applications is quite arcane, despite the existence of these mobile Operating Systems. And all the while all you as a company want to do is publish your message on your user's phone.

Developing applications for handsets is a nightmare. Every handset does meet certain requirements, has certain standard features. Basically, every single model of phone has some kind of technical gotcha that needs a developer to sit, test, debug, witness the Symbian Signed process

Every time a manufacturer releases a new firmware version, there’s a chance your app will fail. Every time a manufacturer releases a new model, there's a chance your app will need extensive redevelopment to work. Then came dotmobi. More of an intellectual change of gear than anything else (plus a couple of bits of development stuff, such as XHTML-MP and CSS rules like(the poor mobile CPU does not want to calculate beautiful gradiated grey scale backgrounds), the idea was to get around handset idiosyncrasies by doing the processing and even interface rendering on the back end, with the handset browser displaying the interface. With some clever design work, a dotmobi service could appear almost indistinguishable from a native application running on the handset.

Basically dotmobi was "software as a service", it was "cloud computing", it was "the network is the computer", long before it became a fad for hip IT directors. Dotmobi is just a TLD with a note to operators please do not reformat pages here. However, the message is more than this: you need a different strategy to address content to mobile users than web users because mobile phones are not poor-man’s computers.

iPhone

Dotmobi was driven by Nokia. Things were moving along sluggishly: there was a direction to go in, where device independence would become a reality. Apple has no interest in device independence, no interest in cross-handset functionality, no interest in anyone other than the buyers of its hardware. It is a strategy solely focussed on the tightest possible integration between the lines of code and the silicon chips, and making sure that no-one, no-one, no-one at all interferes with it.

Unfortunately for Nokia and the end user, the device is wildly successful, and Apple's genius for taking the blindingly obvious and already existent and repackaging it as an earth-shaking innovation won, again. The iTunes store for apps was simple, elegant, and worked.

The other handset manufacturers, particularly Nokia, were left flailing around helplessly. Application developers glommed onto iPhone, and tech commentators and tech press followed unquestioningly.

Except that Apple is not the dominant phone in Africa. iPhone is not the phone in the hands of the masses of consumers out there. It can never be. It's expensive, complex, fragile. But sexy. Seductive. Easy to gush about in blogs and magazines. What they somehow manage to remain entirely oblivious of is that iPhone in South Africa is a negligible audience. And one that can be reached through Web-based dotmobi applications anyway. What a waste of time, money and effort.

Those that want applications on their mobile can get them in the easiest, fastest, most reliable, most efficient way through dotmobi and Web-based services.

What is dotmobi

dotmobi is an ideal solution for retailers because they are not beholden to the internal politics of handset manufacturers, network operators, content providers, and increasingly the developers of phone applications. Now ordinary retail stores are pushing the market independent of what the mobile industry is saying.