Dec

Mobile multimedia trends and mobile service adaptation

: Image via Wikipedia

Reading the specifications for phones today you realize that they are GOOD. Why are your mobile experience of services not as good as those specs? Phone manufactures publish specifications for their newest phones, the press use it to compare phones and declare winners. You read that and make buying decisions based on the information. You expect your mobile experience to live up to those promises but that rarely happens. That they wake up and start to deliver is one of the mobile multimedia trends i have on the wish list for 2009.

Sure, it might sound like a dream to have a service adapted according to your phone´s specifications but it is possible. With powerful server solutions available, at low cost, it is not that difficult to serve each phone perfect mobile content optimization , assuming this is a priority.
In the case of Iphone and Iphone services, optimizing for one device is a built in side effect, since there is only one device released so far.

Quick recap of mobile content optimization

In the beginning mobile service providers used an adaptation-to-the-worst-phone-on-the-market-approach. After a few years, with the growing size and resolution of screens on new phones, came the small-medium-large-approach. Serving different sizes of images and pages avoided hitting a user with tiny images. This is one solution to the problem, easy, simple and cheap, which is good.

Every mobile service provider built their own version of the small-medium-large solution, some smarter than other. Many years later, similar, but smarter categorized adaptation is built in to Portal Software. Advanced content and pages are adapted and served to your phone using off the shelf products. This is a good starting point. But it is not good enough to make your mobile the best channel to consume a certain service at a certain time.

Phone adaptation optimized for your phone is more than mobile content optimization

Phone adaptation is seen as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity. Mobile service providers solve the adaptation problem by installing an off the shelf adaptation platform. Once a week they download the new categorizations of new phones that has been released. Not realizing that only the first step has been taken, not the final one. Adaptation platforms is a tool to help in the adaptation work to make a mobile service optimized for your mobile phone.

Why do you get served a crappy movie clip to a HSDPA phone with a great screen or are forced to paging when your phone supports AJAX? The mobiles are so good and the opportunities to build great services exist. W3C group Ubiquitous Web Applications(replacing Device Independence Activity) are working on recommendations to address this area which shows the business are aware of the problem. Service providers that put in the work needed to optimize for your device will have a better chance to get you as a customer.