Vance from .Mobi was nice enough to send a counter point to my last post. The .mobi versus autodetection debate has gone on for a while, and I’ve stayed out of it, because I wanted to see how much traction .Mobi was able to achieve.

Although I thought that segmenting mobile content on the TLD level was suboptimal, promoting the existence and proliferation of mobile content through .Mobi could create a much needed rising tide - and I’d be all for that.

But in my opinion, the tide hasn’t come in.

Although I honestly love and use their tools, web validators and profilers, and think their promotion of standards and patterns really helps lower the barrier to entry into mobile web development, I didn’t realize until Vance’s post how much I’ve become anti-.mobi TLD.

So I thought I’d post Vance’s link to the .mobi blog post defending their TLD. Check out the link, and then read my comment below - it basically sums up my stance.

Vance’s comment:

dotMobi talked about this on our blog today. You may not agree but I think it’s worth considering all viewpoints. See http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/2008/02/do-you-have-the.html

My reply:

Vance. I understand where your post is coming from, but I don’t agree. Mobile formatting is not akin to geo localization. Not at all.

Even looking at the trivial evolution of this, if we segment mobile formatted content from web content, how then do we further segment the mobile content into localized information? Do you want a .mobi.uk? That’s getting a bit much, don’t you think?

In fact, I’d argue in the opposite direction. I think instead of forcing the user to identify their locale on the web, companies should do an IP geo lookup and forward to the correct localized site. Sure everyone can’t afford an enterprise-class IP lookup service, but BMW certainly can.

Your point about indexing mobile content better through the .mobi domain may have some merit, but not for long. Search engines are getting smarter, and there are many metadata cues that can be used to index properly.

Moving forward, URLs will take a back seat to search and default browser behavior. If I have a brand name, I want a .com domain because that’s the first thing a browser tries if a user only types a single word, and empirically, I see that search engines put .com domains that exactly match single word searches first.

If you get all the phones in the world to default to .mobi first, and all the search engines to place .mobi domains at the top of the list when searching from mobile, then I might buy in.

But as it stands now, if I have a brand name, I want a .com after it, and I want to have as much smarts at the front door as possible to get people to the right content based on their location and their device. Right now that’s the absolute best way to get the most users to the content they want.

I’m all for continuing the conversation in the comments here. I honestly don’t want to bash .Mobi because a lot of what they’re doing is quite good - as I’ve said above. But this TLD thing is just not sitting well with me.

Can someone change my mind? Give it a shot.

Hey LinkedIn, your mobile site is really quite good. It’s going to be a big help adding new people while at conferences, etc. and not having to wait till I can sit down with a laptop.

But if you’re going to use m.linkedin.com instead of detecting user-agents on www.linkedin.com, you might as well have used a .mobi address. (Read: this is the wrong thing to do)

Here’s what you do:

- Redirect based on user-agent from linkedin.com.

- Put a link on the bottom of your mobile pages to get to the full version of the site.

- Feel good that you’re not losing users who don’t know to put an m. before mobile URLs

- Profit!

Come on, if Facebook can do it, so can you.

ABC has created a great mobile site for their Oscars widget, and they wanted to help people discover it through their equally-awesome web/desktop widget.

To help get people to their mobile content, they’re using Clearspring’s Web to Mobile Syndication service to send users mobile when they click the “mobile” button on the widget.

They get to keep their own shortcode, since Clearspring can interface with multiple third-party SMS providers, and integration was merely a matter of calling a single method in the Clearspring Launchpad library.

The day after my last post, AT&T drops the unlimited plans. $35 for unlimited data. Welcome to the party AT&T.

Step 1: create all-you-can eat plans for Voice, Text and Data that people can actually afford.

Check! Verizon, and Sprint have it, and we’re getting there on AT&T.

One problem is “unlimited” data still being limited by carriers, such as AT&T supposedly limiting to 5 gigs transfer per month. So we’ll see what the T&C’s are on these plans when they hit steady state.

Carreirs, meanwhile, expressed their concern, but no real good plan of avoiding the dumb pipe model at Mobile World Congress. Web 2.0 style services won’t serve them here - it’s not their core competency. But I’m sure we’ll see some valiant efforts at it - probably right as the flood of social networks is maxed and people start leaving them in droves.

But, make no mistake - there are plenty of data plans you can buy for reasonable prices and pretty much use normally without worry. What I’m hoping for here are carriers focusing on streamlining their businesses to purely provide connectivity, reducing operating costs, and competing on price points so that the masses - not just businesses and techies - will have solid mobile data plans. At that point, companies who are actually good at Web 2.0-style services can make big time mobile business models and have a non-trivial addressable user base.

Very cool. According to CNet, Starbucks has changed its WiFi provider from T-Mobile to AT&T, and in doing so will change access restrictions to two free hours per day plus $4 each additional two hours.

Having an iPhone means no tethering for my laptop when I’m running around Manhattan, but there are Starbucks every two feet. So this makes a world of difference to me.

We’re at the point now where mobile devices are starting to get some real 3D horsepower. Sony Ericsson’s new XPERIA X1 puts it to use for something more interesting than gaming - a flashy, polished, and (from initial looks) ergonomic interface. Check it out:

It kind of looks like Zumobi with its zooming/paneling app switcher. But remember, under all that coolness is Windows Mobile. So unless they did a complete UI overhaul of all the major apps, as soon as you dive into Outlook Mobile, you’re back to basic gradient and DrawRect() UI land.

As far as I know, the HTC Touch did the deepest re-skinning of a WinMo device to date, but the slickness went away really quickly if you started to use the phone for real. The most can usually hope for is a Media Player skin, a dialer skin, a Today Screen replacement, and an upgraded Launcher. Lets hope SonyE goes full out.

I was digging around for some recent market share numbers and came across some numbers by analyst firm IDC.

Overall, the industry growth has slowed, and they expect the slower growth rate to continue:

“Over the last three years, growth in the industry during the holiday quarter has fluctuated from 18.0% to 30.0%, and this past quarter we saw it drop to 11.6%,” said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. “The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic. We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow.”

Though overall growth slowed, mobile web use is starting to make some dents. The iPhone and S60 are in a battle to lay down the most logs on webservers, according to the NYTimes and Google:

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

There’s an interesting bit about Samsung in the IDC report. They managed to snag the number two spot from Motorola, who have been stagnating, riding that RAZR/ROKR/etc. line and operating system out for way too long at this point:

Samsung achieved several noteworthy accomplishments to end 2007: It took the No. 2 position worldwide for the year, posted its third consecutive quarter as the No. 2 vendor worldwide, and recorded its sixth consecutive quarter of shipment growth.

I’m rooting for Samsung. In the US, they’ve released some solid hits with the Blackjack and Juke in the US and they have more handset models than I can count released internationally. All of them are pretty decent too, and they stack right up there with HTC and UTStarcomm with their Windows Mobile implementations.

But Nokia continues to reign supreme interntaionally:

Nokia shipped more units in the fourth quarter than the next three vendors’ shipment volumes combined. This, Nokia executives pointed out, was the result of its streamlined operations, which produced on average nearly 1.5 million units each day during the quarter.

Interestingly, Nokia makes the most profit and most revenue from their N-Series devices. Though they ship many more low and mid-range devices, they’ve been charging an arm and a leg for the N95 and other high end devices, and people have been paying! A lot!

This shows that people are ready for capable smartphones at the price ranges of mid-range laptops. According to the IDC report:

Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

That’s a lot of the market with very capable handsets!