Sprint Nextel Corp. last week rolled out an updated Web browser designed to deliver “a PC-like experience” on mobile phones. But not everyone is impressed.
The carrier announced plans to launch Openwave Systems Inc.’s OpenWeb, a browser that transcodes Internet content for the small screens and limited memories of mobile phones. Like other transcoding technologies, OpenWeb changes a Web page’s markup, size and layout, converting content to XHTML/MP-compliant pages “on the fly” without a user session. The software includes an automatic detection feature called “Mobile Fetch First,” according to an Openwave representative, “that leverages the phone’s actual user agent on first request and identifies mobile-friendly sites before deploying the content reformatting solution on sites that need adapting.”
“Whether clicking through the Sprint portal or typing in a URL, both new and existing customers can use their Sprint phones to search virtually any Web site and it will appear quickly and in a format they’re used to seeing on their computer screens,” said Kevin Packingham, Sprint Nextel’s VP of wireless product management, in plugging the new offering.
Not everyone impressed
But the new technology drew criticism even before Sprint Nextel announced the effort. WapReview. com’s Dennis Bournique blasted the transcoder, noting that it replaces the phone’s User Agent with its own identifier, preventing Internet publishers from using device-detection technology and rerouting surfers to sites optimized for their handsets.
“The User Agent is the only way that mobile sites can identify the phone model and optimize their markup for different screen sizes, Javascript support, etc.,” Bournique wrote. “If a proxy or transcoder changes, the User Agent sites can’t deliver an optimal Web experience. . Without the User Agent there is no way for the provider to know which content is compatible with the phone.”
Such snags are not uncommon as mobile collides with the PC-centric Internet. Vodafone U.K. experienced similar problems last fall when it deployed transcoding technology from Novarra Inc., and Web publishers two years ago criticized Google Inc.’s transcoding technology, which automatically formats content found through its mobile search engine.
Google now allows Internet publishers to request their pages be excluded from the service – a policy that Sprint Nextel also has adopted, according to a carrier representative who acknowledged the issue.
How effectively a transcoder could automatically recognize and bypass “all mobile-friendly sites” is unclear, however. While some URLs flag made-for-mobile sites – using the .mobi top-level domain, for instance, or the prefix .m – many site operators market their mobile destinations with the familiar .com format, then use device-identification technology to automatically redirect users. And informing publishers that they must request their pages be excluded is an impossible task, given the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet, Bournique wrote.
“I’m sure that 100’s of thousands of mobile site owners and content providers around the world have no idea that Sprint is trampling on their content and that they have to register on Sprint’s developer portal and ask that their markup and headers be left alone,” Bournique posted in an update. “This sort of whitelisting is completely unscalable on the vast (Internet).”
