KEY POINTS:
It's clear by now that Apple's iPhone has been a raging success and that Google, by the end of the year, will have released a mobile operating system designed to make it easier to access the internet from your cellphone.
Mozilla, maker of the open-source internet browser Firefox,
the only browser to have made serious inroads against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, is also planning a mobile internet browser. All of this points to next year being a watershed one for mobile internet services. That's good news. Up until now, surfing the web on your phone has largely been a pretty frustrating experience.
We started out in the late 1990s with WAP (wireless application protocol) websites, custom-built portals that attempted to make it easy to navigate content using the directional buttons on a phone handset. It was over-hyped, ugly and not very useful. Microsoft improved things somewhat with the mobile version of Internet Explorer, which features on smart phones and handheld computers and reformats web pages to fit on a small screen. But the majority of handsets don't support the Windows Mobile operating system.
The first signs that real progress has been made have come in the past year or so. Nokia last year released its Mini Map browser, which is based on the same open source elements built into Apple's Safari browser, which features on the iPhone. The Mini Map browser sits on Nokia's N series phones, such as the N95, and gives you an overall image of the web page before letting you zoom in on certain portions. It makes surfing complex web pages much easier. But the iPhone has, to date, done the mobile internet most successfully.
From the iPhone's menu you have direct access to the popular Youtube and Google Maps applications, just by tapping the icons for them. Everything else on the web is accessed through the Safari web browser. What makes the web-surfing experience so good on the iPhone is the device's touch screen which lets you zoom around web pages easily and expand or shrink them just by touching the screen. Both the iPhone and the N95 have Wi-fi networking built into them and I've used both to access the internet from wireless hotspots.
Apart from the annoying step of having to enter authentication details to gain access to the network, the internet browsing experience is great for both phones.
Now Google is set to enter the fray. It was initially thought that the internet search giant would seek to develop its own handset, the Gphone, and there were hints from the company that it might even use on-screen advertising to subsidise the cost of the phone, effectively giving it to mobile-phone users for free or at greatly reduced prices. It now appears Google has set its sights on building a mobile-phone operating system that can sit on handsets made by a wide range of mobile-phone makers. What's the advantage over the operating systems currently available, such as Symbian, Windows Mobile and Apple's stripped-down Mac OS X? Google's operating system is rumoured to be tailor-made for accessing internet applications and the company already has a host of those Gmail, Google Maps and its search engine among them. While you can download plug-ins to allow access to Google applications on your mobile, the breakthrough for Google will come in the form of an iPhone-like device that offers native support for its internet services.
