This spoke to me quite a bit, as I am now wrapping up work on my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, to be published in January. This book is intended to help marketing and product development professionals, particularly user experience folks, enter the mobile space.

With that in mind, I believe there to be some inaccuracies within Brian's presentation. Some are minor and not relevant, such as the assertion that 2G devices were voice + SMS only and ignoring 1xRTT as part of 2.5G. Relevant inaccuracies include:

• Cingular's terms of service, as of March of this year, specifically prohibit visiting sites outside their content. I fail to understand how this is not a "walled garden"


• Sprint's search engine searches all mobile-optimized sites, and allows direct URL entry for any site. I fail to understand how this is a walled garden.


• Similarly, Verizon has blocked URL opening from SMS messages. Walled? Seems so.


• I have seen no semantic difference between carrier and operator. As best I can see, "operator" is a more European term, and "carrier" is a more American term.


• Brian advocates writing for "feature phones" not "smart phones". A good place to start, but we should remember that smart phone users use more data services, so they are potentially higher users of a given application.


• As more and more people use the mobile Internet and other mobile applications, a larger percentage will be using the mobile as their primary use. Thus functionality that is available on the desktop should, if possible, be available on the mobile -- but not at the cost of the primary user experience! Infrequently used information should be in harder-to-access places.


• While XHTML-MP may be "often referred to as WAP 2.0", that is flat out wrong. WAP is equivalent to HTTP, not XHTML. The WAP 2.0 collection of standards includes push messaging, XHTML, XHTML with WML extensions, location services, transfer protocols and more.


• Flash is available on Verizon, KDDI, and NTT DoCoMo devices, which is a bit beyond "available to developers only". And SVG should be mentioned somewhere.


• J2ME (which ought to be called Java ME) content can run on BREW devices via a BREW-authored KVM. Thus J2ME can go to Verizon devices.

Regardless, it's a good start, particularly for a relatively short presentation. If you're new to mobile design, go read it. And order my book.