I'm awaiting delivery of a Nokia E70 (All About Symbian preview here, review here). The new Nokia browser is one of the key lures that drew me towards upgrading. (There's a comparison of Opera Mobile/Nokia S60 3rd edition browser here — by Ivan Kuznetsov.) Just came across this (via Timo's del.icio.us link feed) by Bernardo Carvalho on rawsocket dot org:
If you take a look where Nokia is taking the S60 3rd edition browser (please please please do yourself a favor and take a look at that demo), you’ll see that the concept of River is kind of old in itself. Why? Because nobody can, in their right mind, expect the industry to transcode the billions of websites that are out there so we can enjoy them on our mobile phones. What we want to do (and what Nokia is doing in S60 3rd edition) is empowering mobile users with a web browsing application that enables them to view websites just as they would see them in their computers - same user experience, no need for transcoding the content.
I was apprehensive when I wrote: 'We don't need separate mobile sites and, although I use the Opera and Google proxy services, I wish sites didn't "have" to be re-purposed'. After all, I'm an end-user and not at all knowledgeable about the technical difficulties involved. But I'm really cheered to read what Bernardo Carvalho has posted.
Incidentally, that same posting expressed some of the thoughts I'd been having about Dave's river of news and the mobile RRS hacks that have come out recently (eg, BBC-river and NYT-river): 'mobility is being packaged differently so old-time webheads can digest it, now that they are screwing around with their first smartphones and thinking what exactly does it all mean for the industry and their businesses. … For anyone who’s been working with mobility for some time it sounds kind of silly, but actually it isn’t - it means that good minds are joining the fray and something good might come out of it. Stay tuned.'
And also via this one post, Howard Rheingold's Shibuya Epiphany:
My epiphany in Shibuya Crossing led me around the world, to observe street culture, visit development laboratories, seek out industry analysts and sociologists -- anybody who could help me make sense of the technosocial phenomena of smart mobs. In Tokyo, I interviewed teenagers who appropriated mobile texting technology and set off a world-wide industry and grassroots cultural transformation. I also talked with the people who steered NTT's DoCoMo to success in the mobile Internet business at the same time their formidable competitors in Europe and America foundered and failed to connect the mobile telephone's portability and popularity with the Internet's capabilities. In Helsinki, I saw how the cultural appropriations of teenagers had transformed the communication norms of the entire society, met futurists and social scientists who studied the future by looking at what people were doing in the streets today. In Stockholm, I rode around the city half the night with a car full of maniacally devoted gamers, engaged in a location-based virtual combat game involving automobiles, laptops and wireless Internet connections, and text messages to mobile telephones.
Now, I'd never heard of the Shibuya Epiphany before and Bernardo explained more about it in a subsequent post (do read): 'So, back in 2000, standing in Shibuya Crossing, Howard Rheingold saw people looking at their phones instead of talking into them, and that blew his mind. That’s the Shibuya epiphany.'
