Need better user input mechanisms

It is really hard for non-qwerty keypad mobile phone users to input text into their mobile web browsers. This fact alone hinders the adoption of using the mobile web to do many of the things we normally do on the desktop web browser.

If only there was a way to save common canned responses to some datastore on your mobile phone, and simply paste them into form fields that you need to enter. I have a Windows Mobile smartphone device, and that is a feature that I most wished for. Sure... the platform supports copy and paste, but only for phones that have pen-based input. Surely, there must be a copy-paste mechanism for those smartphones that only have the joystick/keypad-based input. I have tried several mobile web browsers for my Cingular 2125 Windows Mobile smartphone device, and they all fail on providing this key feature. I tried Opera Mini (J2ME), Pocket IE, and the Opera Browser beta for Windows Smartphones, and it is an incredible chore to input text. A simple copy to datastore and paste mechanism would help alleviate this annoyance.

SXSW 2007 - Brian Fling speaks on Mobile Web

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the SXSW, as it looks like Mobile Web will be more prominently discussed this year. Brian Fling of Blue Flavor gave a presentation at SXSW, and here's his blog page on the subject. He includes a link to his presentation in PDF. I just finished taking a look at it, and he makes some very good points for designers and web developers looking to make a mobile version of their website. Until mobile phone web browsers have reached the same feature set as the desktop web browsers, all the things that Brian covered in the presentation are good to adhere to.

Mobile AJAX from PavingWays

Here's a neat little blog post about Mobile AJAX written by PavingWays Rocco Georgi. He also has a PDF of the slides presentation that he gave in the XML conference 2006 in Boston and during the “Webmontag” in February in Munich. He says he will keep updating that page, and I'm curious to see what other web developers have to say.

My hope is that someday the mobile browser space will be advanced enough that it will rival that of the desktop browser space. That way, web developers can simply write their code once, and that it will render properly on all web browsers - desktop and mobile versions.

Mobile Phone vs Mobile PC

This picture says a lot about how mobile phones and mobile PCs have overlapping features. Someday, this overlap will only get bigger.

Mobile Phone vs Mobile PC

Another article about Mobile Ajax

Check out this article from The Register entitled "iPhone boosts Ajax and fluid UIs". Says pretty much the same thing as my previous post entitled "Mobile AJAX Browser Wars".