Mobile Web

According to a new report by Flurry, more time is being spent using mobile apps than browsing the web. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

I don’t care if you’re a war buff or what sport you’re into, you’re going to be hard pressed to find a more back and forth battle than that for supremacy of the cloud music market right now. Increasing definitive headlines all proved to be premature: “Amazon wins cloud war”, “Google and Apple will acquire [...]

Tennis, everyone? The Family Circle Cup tournament added a fully functional mobile site to its social media arsenal, joining its already existing presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.

Evernote’s iOS app for iPhone and iPad works fine. However, I was curious to see how their redesigned web interface worked on an iPad. So, I pointed Safari mobile at Evernote.com and took a look.

The Shiny New Evernote Web: Redesigned Interface, Expanded Note Sharing Options and More

If you try Evernote’s new web interface on a desktop browser, you’ll noticed that they use IFRAMEs to build their three column design with independent scrolling in each column. Unfortunately, Safari mobile on the iPad does not support IFRAME. So, you cannot scroll below the bottom of the display.

Evernote has a free iOS app that works with the iPad and iPad 2, however. So, this is mostly a point of interest for people like me who sometimes prefer using a web interface instead of leaving the browser view and starting an app on the iPad.

Google has had as much of problem in updating their mobile platform firmware with their hardware partners and mobile operators just like everyone else. Their mobile web story, however, is an entirely different matter. That has been a story of small steady enhancements that taken together has provided an ever better mobile experience on any phone with a modern mobile web browser.

Google’s latest mobile web enhancement takes two existing simple features and creates a potentially lifesaving one.

Click-to-call emergency information

The click-to-call features has been on smartphones for years. It provides the ability for a phone to dial something defined as a telephone number or software that parses text, pulls out telephone numbers, and makes them dialable. The other feature the feature Google added to their web search last November which places emergency phone numbers relevant to a search at the top of a results page. Combining the two features results in being able to dial an emergency phone number by simply touching the phone number in a seach result.

Dictionary.com, which has native apps for Android and iPhone, continues to enhance their mobile friendly website.

m.dictionary.com

The refreshed site lets you toggle between dictionary and thesaurus searches, check out the Word of the Day, and translate between a large number of languages. Their Hot Word Blog provides detailed information about a variety of word and language topics.

The one big negative is the full page advertisements that appear when switching between the site’s functions. The ads are not only huge but also appear slowly. These full page ads are in addition to the smaller ads that appear on some of the mobile sites pages. There’s nothing wrong with ads on a free website to help support it. But, I believe these large slow ad pages detract from what is an otherwise good mobile friendly site.

This is one of those small incremental improvements that makes Google’s mobile website one of the most useful for Android and iPhone users.

Finding the right place when you need it

The open now tells you which businesses listed in a local search result are actually open now just like the feature’s name says. That’s it. How much more simple could it be? Tap the Places link on the top of Google.com’s mobile web site to try it out.

CNBC Mobile (mobile web, iPhone app, Android app) reported their accomplishments for January 2011.

CNBC Digital Sets New Records in January

Here’s a couple of interesting items that I noted:

Page Views
- CNBC Mobile Web: 67 MM page views
- CNBC iPhone App: 47 MM page views
- CNBC Android App: 4.8 MM page views

Given the large number of Android phone sold prior to the January measurement period, I found it odd that Android pages views were one tenth of iPhone pages views. Both apps are free. So, cost is not a factor. Google claims Android phones are selling more units per day than the iPhone. So, even with the iPhone’s head start in the overall market, you would not expect a 1:10 ratio.

Here are a couple of possible reasons I’ll toss out to you for consideration:

1. People who own Android phones are less interested in the news in general (unlikely)
2. People who own Android phones like CNBC much less than people who buy iPhones
3. People who own Android phones prefer to view the mobile web site rather than install an app in their limited app installation space
4. People who own Android phones couldn’t find any apps in the previously awful (but now much better) Android Market

Gmail’s priority inbox feature became available for Gmail’s desktop web view late last summer. It attempts to deduce which of your incoming email is most important and tags it as important. It’s accuracy for me has been 50-50 at best. But, if you’ve found it more accurate and useful, you will be happy to learn that the feature has trickled down to Gmail’s mobile web view for smartphones whose browsers support HTML5.

Priority Inbox in Gmail for mobile

FYI to Windows Phone 7 users: You are out of luck regarding Gmail and this feature. Windows Phone 7 does not support HTML5 (or enough of it).

I noted a month ago (Jan. 10) that fitbit (the activity tracker I’ve been using for many months now) provided a mobile friendly website with your personal activity information at: m.fitbit.com

fitbit Personal Activity Tracker Mobile Friendly Site

However, it looks like fitbit notified their customers about this this week.

Introducing the new, free Fitbit Mobile Website, a powerful new way to get the most from Fitbit. Using your smartphone’s web browser, you can now log food right from the table, enter activities when you finish, or even sneak a peak at your daily stats. It’s designed to be super simple to use from your mobile device (or even an iPad). And it’s free. Hooray!

I noticed that while the mobile site renders correctly (looks as expected) on an iPhone or Android browser, it does not render correctly on a Windows Phone 7 browser.