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The idea behind this is to provide one view of the web from a mobile phone.
All web sites will be translated and adapted to ‘fit’ a mobile phone platform.
This is done my using a Mozilla desktop User-Agent which replaces the existing mobile phone User-Agent. Thus desktop content will be feed to Vodafone and converted to display on your mobile.
This is quite a noble gesture by Vodafone to broaden the reach of the Internet from mobile phones.
That said, it has a lot of worrying developments.
Doesn’t Opera Mini do this with a degree of success already. Couldn’t Opera and Vodafone just be friends? Look, my new Vodafone with Opera Mini already installed and instructions in the user manual.
Should Vodafone implement a proxy translator globally across all gateways are we seeing a generic dumbing down of the mobile web to a common level for all mobile phones.
It is mooted you have the option to turn off the transcoder for your mobile from the Vodafone menu. Lets hope so!!!! Parallel imported phones without a Vodafone ‘blessing’????
A Desktop view of a web site translated to a mobile will not be as complete as a WML or XHTML-MP site designed for mobile phones.
Translating an existing mobile site to fit on a mobile…. Hmmm that seems like a bit of an overhead.
I have a site that provides mobile content. It provides ECMAScript and AJAX to mobile phones should they accept these features.
Will Vodafone faithfully reproduce this mobile experience or drop back to basic HTML. This is the main gripe of mobile web site developers, not being able to present a given mobile phone a unique web experience or identify its features.
My opinion, is that I hope Vodafone does not implement the current UK configuration here in NZ without further consideration.
The idea is good. And I can see the benefits to Vodafone and a large group of it clients. But maybe the goals could have been achieved another way.
Mobile Web browsers have just about caught up with current desktop features (Netfront 3.4, Opera, Nokia and Safari) so this is only really a stop gap over the next year or so.
Oh, as a bit of a giggle, a UK poster noted the User-Agent for a Nokia mobile now identifies itself as a Linux OS using Firefox 1.5.
So if this whole thing takes off and Vodafone succeeds in boosting their Internet usage, be prepared to see a boom in Linux and Firefox usage.
Tom.
