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I love my mobile. I love it to bits. I think it’s a fabulous gadget. I think it’s something really quite magical. It looks great – a sleek and black and chrome object of desire – and it feels fantastic. It’s small and neat and it slips smoothly into my pocket. It’s with me all the time and it can connect me instantly with anyone in the world. I can talk to them or I can exchange text messages with them. I can use my phone to take pictures and film clips that I can share with my loved ones and my friends. I can also use it to access the web and to send and receive emails.

I can’t say that I have the same level of affection for my PC. I just don’t have the same kind of attachment to it, either physically or emotionally. My PC is big and cumbersome. My only connection to it is through my fingertips. It’s a workhorse, a dogsbody, an inert machine squatting in a sulky lump on my desk. I’d be lost without it because it allows me to undertake lots of important tasks, but I rarely thank it for that, not least because the tasks keep me tied to my work station. All in all, it really is no match for my beloved mobile.  

Mobile phone technology is advancing rapidly right now. We still call it a phone, but it’s so much more than that. It’s like a mobile toolkit, a technological Swiss Army knife if you will, and that description is likely to have increasing resonance over the next few years as the mobile acquires ever more uses. One of the many radical new applications is a mobile phone-based management system for people with diabetes, which is currently being piloted by a number of NHS Trusts around the UK. An adaptor fitted to the patient’s blood glucose monitor sends readings to a hospital database system via a Bluetooth enabled mobile and the patient is immediately alerted if their sugar levels are dangerously high or low.

This technology can also be utilised to help people with high blood pressure, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. See what I mean about a mobile phone being magical? But the most magical thing of all about a mobile is it knows exactly where you are on the planet. Which is something that doesn’t simply set it apart from our old friend the PC, it sends it spinning off into another stratosphere – especially when it comes to accessing the internet.

More and more people are using their mobiles to surf the internet and send emails. Some people have been doing this for some time, of course, but I think we’re getting beyond the point where the mobile web is the preserve of the early adopters, those techno trendies for whom being first means everything. Despite a catalogue of interoperability and usability problems, there’s certainly now an expectation that a phone is a good way to access the internet. And as that expectation grows and spreads, companies will need to start pedalling a bit harder and a bit faster to make sure their mobile sites are up to the job.

Apple has been making plenty of noise about the internet capabilities of their recently launched iPhone. But whereas many websites look pretty good and work fairly well on an iPhone, most look dreadful and many don’t work at all on other types of mobile. It would be completely wrong to assume that what is right for a PC is also right for a phone. There are major differences between a mobile website and a website viewed on a mobile – although some companies have failed to grasp that there are any differences at all.      
 
By ‘mobile website’, I mean a site that has been created specifically for being viewed on a phone rather than on a computer. A dot-mobi rather than a dot-com. The differences between the two fall into two broad areas. Firstly, there’s the design and functionality of a site. The size and shape of a mobile screen is obviously a big consideration here. Viewing an all-singing and all-dancing website on a mobile phone is like trying to watch an IMAX movie on an old portable telly. It simply doesn’t work.    

The second difference is the site content. Because a mobile knows where you are, it can provide information that is specific to your location, which opens up a whole new universe of potential. Interestingly, this new universe is founded on principles that are almost the opposite of those of the ‘world wide web’. It’s not global, it’s local. It’s not panoramic, it’s precise. It’s not something for everyone, it’s something for the individual.

The internet is used in two main ways – for browsing and for searching. Browsing is a leisurely process and it suits a static instrument like my sulky lump of a PC. You might browse through a site to read a review of a movie, for example. But if you want to go to a cinema to see that movie, you need to search for information to find out which cinema is showing the film, what time it starts, and so on. And with our increasingly busy and fluid lives, people often want to access information like that when they are on the move, when they are on the fly. In which case, a PC isn’t much use to them. A mobile, on the other hand, is the ideal tool. 

A mobile website needs to be more than just a bolt-on to a ‘regular’ site. It’s not a side order, an extra little service. It’s something that requires a radical re-think. Commercial and marketing directors need to carefully consider the best way for their companies and organisations to take their current web model and manage it to make it work on a mobile device. There will be tangible commercial benefits for those that get it right. And the more they get it right, the more reasons I’ll have to keep loving my mobile.

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