Week 5: The Mobile Web

Thing #12 Differences between the Internet and the Mobile Web

So, since tablets and mobile phones can e-mail, print, create documents, play games, and access the Internet, they’re just as good as computers now, right? Well . . . not really. Mobile devices do have the Internet, but it’s a limited version called the Mobile Web (you may notice this if you do a search for videos on YouTube on a computer and then do the same search on mobile YouTube – it’s probably not the same list). Mobile devices still have trouble loading and displaying full Internet pages. The Internet (a collection of connected computers around the world) has been around since the 1950s, but the World Wide Web (the collection of pages we see and know as the Internet) is relatively new, and already it’s morphing into the Mobile Web, which is really an entirely different kind of Web. For thing 12, read a couple articles about the differences between the full Internet and the Mobile Web.

This is a bit dry, but informative: http://webtrends.about.com/od/mobileweb20/a/mobile20_v_web.htm

Skip to “In Summary” at the bottom of this one: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/03/10-ways-mobile-sites-are-different-from-desktop-web-sites.php

Thing #13 The difference between apps and Mobile Sites

Now that you know all about the Internet vs. the Mobile Web, there’s another distinction: an app vs. a mobile site. A mobile website is similar to a regular Internet website: you access content through a browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.), and load pages through the browser window with the ability to bookmark and type in website addresses. An app – which is short for “application” – is sort of like a mini-program. You download apps so they are saved on your phone, just like you would download a program to your computer, using your device’s app store. Some apps are free and some cost money, and you navigate through them using links to pages at the bottom of the screen. There is a hybrid as well called a Web app (this is what we use for our Marcellus app). Web apps are accessed initially through a website (for us, it’s http://mfl.mobapp.at), then downloaded and saved to the desktop as an app, rather than downloaded from an app store.