The nature of mobile devices, and also their users, makes it expensive to build services that meet the requirements. Even if it is expensive to build a quick, reliable and easy-to-use application on a PC, it’s much more expensive to do it for a mobile phone.
The expensive way
Rather often, cost estimates on building mobile services are based upon the costs of earlier, PC-based servcies. It has been common to launch projects trying to port PC applications and services into mobile ones, often by using the same tools.
The conclusion at the end is most likely to be that a mobile service has to be rethought from the beginning, it’s simply not possible to port between two such different anvironments in an efficient way. This is due to technical limitations as well as the mobile usage scenarios.
Network capacity and device limitations regarding to memory, processing power, graphical performance, display size etc limits what can be done. The situations in which mobile services are to be used limits what is usable.
Mobile “use environments” puts higher requirements on availability and simplicity than PC applications. There are no mouse or large screen, the user is often standing up, and has only one free hand – facts that easily make an applicaiton useless because it is overcomplicated, shows to much unstructured information, and requires to much “clicking” to achieve their goals.
Just try to browse around on the mobile web and use some services while walking or driving, and you see what we mean.
