Summary and Future Possibilities

To conclude this chapter I'd like to take a quick peek into the future and attempt to predict the fortunes of the mobile Web and mobile controls.

The Future of the Mobile Internet

One thing is certain the mobile Web is here to stay. In fact, it may become so pervasive that the future may be entirely wireless. However, this situation is a long way off, so let's just consider the next few years for now.

For a start, more and more people will gain mobile Internet access. More devices will be available at a lower cost and will be more useful. You can expect the available bandwidth to increase rapidly , and enhanced usability will come with this speed and with packet networks. It will soon become essential for most organizations with a Web presence to develop for mobile devices.

However, many of the limitations of mobile devices are impossible to surmount. There will always be a tiny display area when compared to desktop PCs at least until you can display information directly onto the human retina I suppose! You will also be hampered when it comes to other capabilities important for multimedia applications.

The upshot of this is that you will still need to design classic and mobile Web applications in different ways even if you don't end up using WML. In fact, WAP 2.0 uses XHTML (although the dialect used looks very similar to and works in a similar way as WML). This may mean that it will be easier for Web designers to make the leap to mobile applications, but still doesn't change the fact that a single Web application is unlikely to be suitable for all browsers unless specific customizations are made; and, of course, one candidate for this could rely on mobile controls.

The Future of the Mobile Controls

The mobile controls provide a viable alternative to low-level mobile application design. Although traditional Web designers may find them tricky to use, their power is obvious. However, there are problems.

For a start, there are currently many devices with many browsers and subtle differences. The best developer team in the world would surely have a tough time keeping up with developments. This means that interoperability issues will continue to abound, particularly so when proprietary device enhancements are taken into account. To maximize usability it is often desirable to make use of these, resulting in significant code differences between even quite similar devices. Can mobile controls account for this? In theory, they can. However, this may mean a fair bit of effort is required on the part of developers to write device specific code. Mind you, the extensibility framework is in place, so all is not lost! Perhaps, in a few years time, the mobile controls covered here will form the basis of a significant amount of multi-browser Web applications. If the development team at Microsoft continues to develop them, then I for one will be very interested in the results.