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On Monday evening, June 6, 2005, Openwave hosted the meeting of the
Bay Area chapter of Mobile
Monday. We were thrilled with the large turn out of folks either
interested in or already working in the mobile space from around the
region.
Along with Russel Beattie, the organizer and moderator of the forum, were Brian Fling -- who talked about some of the basic principles of usability that often, for some reason, go sadly ignored in the mobile context -- and Openwave's very own Ron Mandel. Ron talked about "Device Diversity, What's a Developer to Do?" The slides from Ron's talk are available in the Mobile Monday file archive and much of the content he referred to can be found on the Openwave Developer site. Aside from extolling the virtues of WURFL and WALL, Ron outlined some of the challenges developers face as they build applications for the billion or so mobile data users around the world. The points of divergence for devices run the gamut from the mundane issues of screen size, resolution and color depth to the arcane minutia of exactly which JSRs have been implemented on the device. In addition, there are a number of issues that arise from implementation differences, as device manufacturers implement their own widgets with varying degrees of concern about usability. A lively discussion ensued around the future directions of mobile applications: will they all be downloadable, executable apps or is there an ongoing future for the browser as an application environment. As you could imagine, Openwave firmly believes that the browser environment provides a long term, potentially powerful platform that can allow developers not only to create compelling applications and services, but also take them to market quickly. Certainly, there will always be applications that make more sense and function more effectively in a downloaded context, but similarly there will continue to be applications that are delivered most effectively through a browsing client. Openwave continues to innovate and evolve the Openwave Phone Suite Version 7 to bring a richer application environment to market. We look forward to being an ongoing part of Mobile Monday and were delighted to host the June meeting |