Something occurred to me yesterday: the fixed Internet enjoyed a period of rapid innovation between 1995 and 1998 as improved browsers were released with new capabilities (images, Javascript, plugins, Java, Flash) and adopted quickly. Ooh a new Netscape - quick! Download it!

Mobile hasn't enjoyed this cycle of rapid upgrades and is increasingly fragmented, partly because of the difficulty of upgrading or installing software which is typically baked into the devices. Yes, you can do firmware upgrades (and it's even technically possible to do them over the air) but it's hardly simple. And all those folks hanging round with older phones are a headache to deal with.

Is this somewhere where downloadable Java or Flash apps could help? What if we bundle the means of viewing content in with the content itself, so that refreshing one refreshes (upgrades, updates, bug-fixes) the other? Would a framework for producing these lightweight apps be more workable than a traditional browser-based means of distributing content, even if it duplicates some of the functionality of browsers?

Comments

[Alex]

Tom, thanks for the link - my hope is that a mobile widget engine could certainly provide this kind of functionality. As more people develop widgets and suggest new features we could enter that phase of rapid adoption. I'm trying to stick with the W3C standards as a baseline, but ultimately we need to be driven by the kinds of applications that *real* people want to use..

Alex
joemoby.com

[Spencer]

I think you are talking about an important transition. I was at the Moto Dev Summit yesterday in San Jose and heard Moto's pitch for their "WebUI" initiative based on WebKit. They are talking about the ability to ship a shell app that is largely server driven, renders HTML as a primary display mechanism, and has local JS support. Reported available at the end of this year on a few handsets.

I think where.com is interesting along these lines too. They are focused on supporing LBS enabled widgets, but I think their value as a generic widget engine could be more important in the long run (LBS is a feature not a product!).

Spencer
deepdarksee.com

[Tomsoft]

Hello Tom,

I definitively share your view too. We at webwag worked since two years on a mobile framework to display widget on phone. There is two levels of interest on this:
- the application iteslef (the renderer) can be easily updated OTA
- the content (Widget) can also be easily updated

It will take time before we'll see a stnadard framework (if any) emerge for this, so we think it's one of the best solution for now.

http://webwag.com/
and
http://webwag.com/mobile