Last November in Barcelona at the W3C Mobile Web Initiative workshop I posed a question of Web authoring. I noted that it was easy to author in the early days of the Web. A simple text editor was all you needed. Today we find that authoring is a complex activity, frequently requiring the assistance of specialised tools. Authoring for the mobile Web is going to be considerably harder, unless you have access to some good content transformation solutions. So will the mobile Web be dominated by readers? Will anybody be able to write?

Johan Hjelm from Ericsson pointed out that mobile blogging could be the answer. The blog server provides the framework and the authors provide the raw content. Simple.

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Samsung has reported a hit on its profits for last quarter, with Motorola and Nokia probably winning at Samsung’s expense. We can expect Samsung to respond soon with a lot of new devices, though hopefully not like their recent SCH-S310 that you can use by shaking it, or waving your hands at it. You can imagine the hilarious sight of someone using such a device while walking down the high street.

In the USA, Vonage is planning a WiFi phone that will enable voice calls from WiFi hot-spots. Nobody is considering what the hotspot providers have to say about this. Many hotspots work out their pricing based on predicted usage, and the introduction of WiFi voice could radically alter usage patterns. It wouldn’t surprise me if the hotspots either blocked voice traffic, or raised usage tarrifs, if services such as that suggested by Vonage were to become widespread.

The article on USA Today also says that Motorola and Nokia will be introducing dual-mode phones soon, and will support roaming between networks. Given the problems I often encounter just roaming between cells, not to mention protocols, it will be interesting to see [click title to read more…]