Bearfruit

I’m increasingly convinced that the mobile platform is going to be the key platform for the future. I’ve started investigating and even purchased a phone and dataplan capable of browsing the web (not an iPhone - I think they’re still an outlier, though an important one for sure). But I still have more questions than answers:

• What browsers do you test with? Which ones have a significant market share? How do you test with multiple browsers?
• Are browsers for mobile handsets standards compliant? Which standards should I target?
• Do you trust device emulators as an indicator of the true end-user experience? Which emulators do you use?
• What concerns do you have regarding security? It seems that these devices frequently use proxies controlled by the carriers, are you comfortable transmitting secure data?
• What user interface standards do you count on?

This last point presents some interesting questions. For example, the homepage for my mobile phone uses numbered lists heavily and limits them to 10 per list, 1 - 0 (0 is the 10th item). Pressing the index number of the list item jumps is equiv to clicking that link. So for example, if item 3 is “ringtons” pressing the 3 on your phone takes you to the ringtone page. If there are more than 10 then a link appears at the end saying, “next 2>>” or similar.

However, other sites, for example Google, do not use this same convention. So are there de-facto standards and if so, what are they and why would I not use them?

So many questions… it’s an interesting new web…