When the iPhone launched in the US last week, UK-based Wapple had already identified its unique properties and worked out how to deliver mobile Internet sites optimised for the Apple display and browser. The iPhone is the latest in some 5,000 different mobile devices supported by Wapples mobile Internet Delivery Engine – part of the Wapple Canvas suite of tools to develop and manage mobile internet sites. The iPhone is due to be launched in the UK later this year.
With thousands of different mobile devices already in use around the world, and more than 40 to 50 new ones appearing every month, each with their own screen formats, capabilities and technical quirks, ensuring that a mobile Internet site can be viewed properly on all of them is a major problem, says Wapple. Wapple overcomes this by doing the research in advance and automatically learning about new devices when they access mobile sites. Using this data, the Wapple Delivery Engine automatically renders and optimizes mobile Internet pages for display on any device with any browser.
Wapple automatically customises and renders mobile Internet pages to individual browser-based mobile phones, as well as PDAs and some hand-held games consoles such as the Sony PSP. It delivers rich XHTML, HTML, CHTML and WML content to 3G, iMode, GPRS and GSM networks as well as Wireless LAN.
Building all-inclusive designs for the mobile Internet is far more difficult than covering the inconsistencies of a handful of PC web screens and browsers,” says Wapple.net CTO and Co-founder, Rich Holdsworth. A mobile site has to transfer across literally thousands of devices. Wapple Canvas makes it easy to design and deliver a mobile-centric experience that fully exploits the capabilities of each phone.”
By knowing more about the users handsets, it is also possible to target certain demographics that may, for example, have high-end handsets. And as it would also be foolish to deliver video or Java applications to older devices that do not support these formats, Wapple prevents this from happening whilst retaining the optimum user experience.
Apple has been very secretive, but we first spotted the iPhone device accessing Wapple-hosted mobile sites some months ago and this helped us to fill in many of the gaps we needed to ready Wapple sites in advance of the official launch,” says Holdsworth.