Pocket power

IDEA No 86

THE MOBILE WEB

By the end of 2014, there will be more mobile devices than people on earth. Most of them will have WiFi connectivity. Wherever we go, we are connected.

The Nokia 9500 Communicator, introduced in 2004, was the first phone able to render HTML pages.

The first WiFi-enabled mobile phones appeared in Japan on the NTT DoCoMo network in 1999. At the time, Europe and the US were using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), a standard made specifically for mobile devices. It is fair to say that it never really caught on. Not only were connection speeds poor, the content was too. The first WiFi-enabled phone in the US ...

Get 100 Ideas that Changed the Web now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.