Browsing for Perfection

By improving the user interface, supporting more markup languages, devices and applications, vendors are enhancing the wireless Internet.

Five years ago, there was no such thing as a wireless browser. Today, half of all handsets are sold with browsers, and by 2004, all handsets will have them, according to the Yankee Group.

Putting a Web-enabled handset in every wireless user's hands is one thing. Getting them to use the browser will be quite another.

In such a young market, there's room for improvement and innovation, which is just what the companies who make wireless browsers are focused on. Many of their R&D efforts are aimed at improving the user interface.

Openwave controls about 76% of the global market for wireless browsers with its Up. Browser, according to internal and external estimates. Others, including Nokia and Microsoft, have developed wireless browsers as well.

In 1995, a company called Liberus (now Openwave) developed its first wireless browser, according to Tim Hyland, Openwave director of product marketing in the device products group. Version 1.0 actually was used by AT&T and a few other carriers that offered limited wireless data services on the CDPD network with phones from PCSI (now-defunct).

Since then, more than 40 handset manufacturers have licensed the UP.Browser, which is now shipping as version 4.1 and supports WML and HDML. The first three versions supported only HDML. It will operate on most air-interface protocols. And when 3G networks and handsets are deployed, most browsers will support nearly all markup languages, including XHTML, cHTML, HDML, WML and XML.

It was not until version 2 that Openwave experienced what Hyland called "modest commercial success" with 20,000 users worldwide.

An important development in the brief history of wireless browsers was the formation of the WAP Forum in 1997.

Hyland said the first release of the WAP standard was based largely on technology developed by Unwired Planet with input from other WAP Forum members.

"But as we were doing development, we had actual devices and hardware to learn what worked well and how to improve things," said Hyland, who has been with the company's browser group four years. "The biggest problem area was the user interface - the constraints of the device. The limited data input and limited display forces you to develop browsers different than for a PC. That was not very obvious to a lot of people back then."

Know the User "A key to success in this market involves real-world experience," said Dave Berndt, Yankee Group analyst, in a recent report on wireless browsers. "Much of what is known regarding what makes a good browser has come from the end users and operators directly. This factor continues to favor Openwave's continued market leadership. However, there are still significant areas for development."

Anyone who has experimented with the wireless Internet will agree that the experience is far from refined.

"I would pretty much tell anyone to forget using a cell phone for Web access," said an online review of a Web-enabled handset published on epinions.com. "Typing even a simple e-mail or reply is a tedious and slow process that makes you just want to hit delete and give the person a call. My provider also counts any Web access, be it composing an e-mail message or using the highly limited Web browser, against your plan minutes. So don't upgrade solely based on Web access, you will be disappointed."

Openwave's Hyland understands the root of this reviewer's disappointment.

"The actual ability to look at the screen and intuitively figure out how to do the task ... is the single most frustrating thing for users," Hyland said. "Our browser was designed for phones with soft keys - keys right below the screen that don't have a text label. The command that will be executed when you hit that button is displayed on the LCD screen right above that button. So we designed our browser to work best on phones with two soft keys. However, sometimes this browser gets put on phones that don't have any unlabeled keys. Then the maker of that phone has to find some way to map these commands that are defined by the application to the keys. When the label on the key and the label above the key don't match - that is the biggest area that needs improvement. That's something we're going to be addressing in version 5."

A Powerful Future There are a number of areas of possible future enhancement and innovation in the wireless browser market. Two of those areas - memory/capacity issues and the possibility of over-the-air browser upgrades - might remind many of PC development.

Ed Suwanjindar, Microsoft mobile devices division product manager, said wireless browsing is not in itself a resource-intensive activity. But that could change with future improvements to devices.

"In the Pocket PC space, most of our Pocket PC partners are shipping with a minimum of 133MHz processors, so most of that power is never used in the Web-browsing mode," Suwanjindar said. "The Compaq Pocket PC actually has a 206MHz processor, which would have been enough to power a desktop computer a couple of years ago.

"Having that sort of power available is valuable when you are trying to do a number of tasks," he said.

Just as you upgrade desktop software from time to time, some have predicted that wireless browsers will be upgradeable in the future. But rather than putting a mini-disk drive in your phone, those upgrades theoretically would take place over the air. For reasons of net-work control and management, Suwanjindar and others interviewed didn't think carriers would be eager to perform over-the-air browser upgrades anytime soon.

"The bandwidth today is still not such that users would have a great experience updating applications over those connections," he said.

Paul Chapple, Nokia software group manager of U.S. business development, said that while browser and application upgrades might be in the cards for future smart phones and communicator-class handsets, your average handset user will not be interested in such a capability.

"You don't want people to have to think about the browser," Chapple said. "The beauty of mobile phones is that they're inherently convenient. I don't think anyone has ever said reloading software is inherently convenient."

Keep It Simple Rather than creating new headaches for wireless Internet users, browser manufacturers should simplify the experience, say the experts.

"Many a time, people (focus on) the snazziest applications," said Regina Wong, ARC Group wireless Internet consultant. "But at the end of the day, who's going to use the service and contribute toward the revenues? It's consumers. More thought has to be put into what consumers think - what they would like to use. Do they find it easy to use? Or was it a huge inconvenience?"

At Openwave, future versions of the UP.Browser will allow for easier data input.

"Entering information on your phone keypad is not very easy," Openwave's Hyland said. "There are a couple of companies out there, like Tegic, Xycorp and Lexicus, that build systems that make it easier to enter data. And we've built our browser such that a company who licenses Tegic's text-entry system can link it with our browser very easily - and the same with the other companies."

A large part of Microsoft's approach to user-friendly wireless data access is to offer consumers three main types of devices to choose from: a PDA, feature phone (regular wireless handset) or smart phone. Microsoft's smart phone, code-named Stinger, is a hybrid design that bridges the PDA and handset.

Microsoft's Mobile Explorer browser is available today on Sony Z5 handsets in Europe, and is a dual-mode, HTML and WAP browser. Many browsers are moving toward a similar multimode support model.

The Stinger and Pocket PC both use Microsoft's Pocket IE browser, which supports Internet standards including HTML, XML and SSL.

"The only thing that browser won't do is flash animation," Suwanjindar said. "Other than that, with a Pocket IE browser, you're able to go anywhere you want on the Web. We made the investment in providing a richer browser client, because we believe that, as wireless connectivity becomes more pervasive, and the bandwidth increases, particularly American users used to rich multimedia experiences on their desktops are going to have similar expectation for their mobile device."

One issue that has created some disagreement within the wireless browser community is an open source code. Nokia will allow customers the ability to customize browser capabilities by adjusting its source code.

Paul Chapple, Nokia software group manager of U.S. business development, said that some people have misunderstood the company's approach.

"What we do is license the source code of our browser," Chapple said. "Open source implies that you take the source and throw it up on the 'Net somewhere and let people play with it. We don't do that."

But Chapple does contend that licensing source code allows handset manufacturers integrating wireless browsers to better control engineering and innovation.

"If there are things you want to add, you need to be able to get in there," he said. "It's always easier to have source. The other sources that are out there - primarily Openwave and Microsoft - they're excellent, but they're black boxes. If you have a carrier that decides to do something a little different, the handset manufacturer is wed to the delivery schedule for those companies."

Though Chapple said Nokia had provided source code to other manufacturers, he declined to name those companies. Under such an agreement, Nokia would allow other handset manufacturers full access to the same resources Nokia itself has access to.

"We will license the source code and then we're happy to just go away," he said. "We would not make another manufacturer dependent on us. "It (browser source code) is not our core business. So to the extent that we can keep it open and vibrant, it is to our advantage."

Ed Suwanjindar, Microsoft mobile devices division product manager, said his company only provides its code to OEMs for integration with devices.

"But we want to own that code and make sure we have a consistent platform for people," Suwanjindar said. "The issue with open source is that once you enable that scenario, you can get an array of variants on your applications. We would rather keep a consistent set of applications."

Tim Hyland, Openwave director of product marketing in the device products group, agreed that browser vendors providing open source code was not the right approach.

"In the environment of mobile phones, open source is a little scary," Hyland said. "If you download an open source program for your PC, and it doesn't work, you navigate somewhere and download the new version. But with a mobile phone there's really not that possibility."

Although Openwave offers manufacturers access to its source code as part of a license, most don't even inquire about it.

"What we've found is that the manufacturers that license our browser generally trust us with the source code," he said. "They know that if they break something by making changes during their customizations, they'll be liable for those problems. But if they use our source code just the way it is, they know it's been tested on dozens and dozens of phones and tested by dozens of operators. So we offer the code, but most companies don't take it."