In the latest attempt to make the ‘traditional’ Internet, and Mobile Internet into “one place,” Sprint has rolled out OpenWeb, an Openwave product. OpenWeb is “a content adaptation platform that transparently intercepts requests for all standard web sites and converts the web pages into highly compressed, functional WAP2 pages.” In simpler terms, OpenWeb is a process that takes an existing Web site, and does its best to make it a decent experience on a mobile device.

The Good
With access to the Mobile Web by the average cellphone user still in the vast minority, it is a great step in getting users used to visiting the mobile web on their handset. While there may be some underlying reasons for Sprint rolling this out (competing with the iPhone web experience), I do feel like Sprint is looking further down the line on progressing the industry in the right direction. The more people they can get on the mobile web, the more of an opportunity there is for everyone.

The Bad (and the Uuuugly)
As you may expect, there is truly no “one algorithm to rule them all.” Since it is hard to find consistency across most web sites, as you can imagine, the task of re-purposing a web page into a screen less than 1/5th the size yields a pretty messy result. Additionally, the compression algorithms can wreak havoc on image quality. For the mobile developers out there, say goodbye to the User-Agent (active mobile developers may have seen this as OpenWeb was being tested regionally in February), it gets replaced by an OpenWeb User-Agent. If you use this at all you must double check your site isn’t being put through OpenWeb.

Fear not, Mobile specific sites
Fortunately, in true form, Sprint has provided an “ignore my site” capability for companies with mobile specific destinations. Under the new system, as a global “ignore”, anything starting with “m” or “wap”, including the word “mobile” in the URL, or ending in “.mobi” will NOT be transcoded or optimized (these are just a few, full list available in the Sprint developer forum). Additionally, Sprint has allowed submissions of URLs to not be put through the OpenWeb process.

While its sometimes daunting to see the Carriers flex their muscles, and show how one simple changes can force an entire industry to comply, I feel Sprint did a great job of keeping the community informed of the rollout, and offering sufficient means to work with the new system. As a whole, this can only be good for the industry, we just hope some standard gets set and each carrier doesn’t follow suit with their own idea of how to do this.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Mobile Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.