Mobile internet sites used to be appalling,” says Nigel Thomas, a finance manager from Kent, “but they have definitely improved, thanks especially to the latest handsets.” Thomas frequently surfs the web on his mobile to check sports results and news bulletins. He is not alone: over the past year, 5.5m Britons accessed the internet on their mobile phones, Continental Research reports.
That figure constitutes only 15% of the mobile-phone-owners in this country. Many people were put off years ago after phone manufacturers relentlessly over-hyped poorly designed sites, limited handsets and dreadfully slow connections. The running joke used to be that the “C” had been missed off when someone named the mobile internet standard Wap (Wireless Application Protocol). “It was so frustrating when you constantly received the ‘GPRS connecting’ message,” Thomas says of Wap.
No more. Today, there’s a plethora of good-quality, fast mobile internet sites and services that work as well on run-of-the-mill handsets as on overblown 3G phones — from news feeds, instant messaging and e-mail access to monitoring of eBay auctions and mapping services. Yet Continental reports that 41% of mobile surfers are unhappy with the choice of mobile websites. More likely, they are simply unaware of what’s available.
Why is the much-improved quality of mobile internet access still such a secret? One reason is that mobile-phone networks have been fencing millions of customers into their own mini versions of the mobile internet and encouraging them never to leave — either by making it difficult or impossible to surf websites beyond their own “walled gardens”, or by charging exorbitant fees when you do so.
Mark Graves, 29, an accountant from south London, has become so irritated by the internet service on his Vodafone mobile that he has virtually stopped using it. “I’ve only recently realised that there is anything beyond the world of Vodafone,” he says. “It takes about five minutes just to leave Vodafone Live, then looking for whatever you want takes ages. It’s more hassle than it’s worth.”
Vodafone, the country’s biggest mobile-phone network, discourages customers such as Graves from going beyond its own portal by making the outside world difficult to access. On the Motorola E1000 phone that I have been testing, you reach Vodafone Live content by pressing a single button; to enter the address of an external website takes at least three button-presses — and the command is in a well-hidden menu.
Paolo Pescatore, senior analyst at the technology research firm IDC, says: “It’s not obvious, and it’s not being marketed. If they don’t tell people how to access off-portal content, people won’t.” Even a Vodafone spokesman admitted that his is “not the easiest service to get off”.
If hidden functions don’t put off determined surfers, the excess charges probably will. Vodafone Live’s content is free. Stray beyond its walls, however, and you’re looking at charges of up to £7 per megabyte downloaded. So, if you call down a ring tone or music track from an external website, you end up paying twice — one fee for the song and another for the cost of the data transfer. “It doesn’t seem fair, and it will actually restrict the growth of Wap” says Graves. “It would benefit everyone if every site was easily available at no extra cost.” Everyone apart from the networks, that is.
Vodafone strikes lucrative commercial deals with the companies that appear on its Live portal, so the company’s best interests lie in preventing millions of eyeballs from straying. Or, as the Vodafone spokesman eloquently said: “We’re incentivising people to use our services.” But, he added: “We’re in the process of looking carefully at on- and off-portal browsing and making them friendlier.”
The network is far from alone. O2’s i-mode portal gives customers with adapted handsets access to 150 websites, including eBay and ITN. Some O2 customers have found that when they try to reach favourite sites not offered by i-mode, things go awry. “I could access the live railway-departure boards fine with my old phone, but now, when I type in the site address, it directs me to the web page for National Rail that I’d see on my PC, which i-mode finds difficult to show,” Andy Flowers, an O2 customer, gripes on an internet message board. It’s because his NEC phone doesn’t support Wap, the language most mobile sites are written in; it offers only i-mode.
O2 admits trying to draw traffic to i-mode, but denies deliberately making life difficult for people wanting to go beyond. Mobile surfing with normal Wap phones, it believes, is simply not up to much. The company claims customers will avoid disappointment with mobile surfing by sticking with i-mode content, which is adapted for mobile handsets. Jag Minhas, chief architect for data products at O2, says: “There are handsets that offer full web browsing, but the problem is that full web pages don’t work well on small handset screens. Simplicity will drive uptake — people don’t want to type a full web address into a mobile phone.”
He has a point. Anyone who has tried to browse a normal web page on an ordinary handset will know what an ugly mess is produced, as the phone struggles to cope with the formatting and mass of graphics. But new “filter” technology from Google and Opera makes it possible to access full web pages from pretty much any mobile bought within the past couple of years.
Type in www.google.co.uk on the web browser of a phone and you’ll be directed to Google’s dedicated mobile search. You can search the full internet, but software at Google’s end adapts the web pages so that they don’t appear as a horrendous jumble on your handset. Pages that were unreadable on the browser of my standard Nokia 6230i were much easier to scan after I searched for them with Google. Yahoo! provides a similar service for 3’s mobile customers, who until recently were restricted to a limited number of mobile-tailored sites, despite the many promises of 3G technology.
