The current mobile browser market is chaos; while only a few browsers (IE, Firefox, and Safari) dominate the PC market, there are a number of mobile browsers in the world. What’s worse for developers, each browser has different specs; some browsers fully support Javascript and Adobe Flash while the other poorly supports even CSS, for instance.
The below is a rough research report of mobile browsers that I’ve made for my previous project. Hope it’s useful for someone interested in the mobile internet.
The UI library is provided at Google code. It has less elements than others, yet very useful.
All the aboves look great. It’s recommended to pick up the software you prefer first, and then try the elements. Notice that some UI elements that you need might be missing in the aboves, which means that you need to create the ones for your mockup.
I personally prefer Fireworks because:
I’m more familiar with it (using for like 4 years)
Fireworks doesn’t eat up lots of memories like Photohsop
Easy to work in a big stage size; I always set it as 4000×4000, and put a bunch of content into a single .png file
Anyway, those are all I found on the web. Let me know if you know other sources
I’ve made a new post on Mobinode about Navi2Go, a car navigation system on mobile phone. It was a great opportunity to have an interview with 3DVU the provider of Navi2Go.
I’m personally curious about Navi2Go’s future competition against Google Map. It provides you a direction to your destination and real-time traffic status. The Google Map for iPhone has also added the Street view feature in its latest update. And yes, it’s free.
In terms of features, however, Google Map doesn’t have a voice guidance with real 3D photos, which keeps Navi2Go more attractive. But nobody believes that Google Map for iPhone is the final update - sooner or later, it would be updated with more features. We just don’t know what’s next on Google Map.
What if Google Map is integrated with Google Earth, which is already available on iPhone? Or, what if voice recognition system is integrated into it? How will Navi2Go keep its advantage in the market, when Google Map provides more competitive features for free? No answers for those questions yet of course, but I guess we’ll see in a new few years.
The mobile market in Japan is the most advanced in the world, which is explained in the first link above. I’ve been managing couples of web service for Japanese mobile for four years, and found there’re a bunch of interesting things going on in Japanese mobile market such as Flash Lite, UGC, etc. I will post on mobinode when get a chance.
