Mail on the Move

Globally mobile data usage is up, says a study by AT Kearney. And the moment
of truth will come when the mother of all killer apps, e-mail, is available on
the phone in a format that makes it as simple as on the PC.

MobileWebSurf (MSW), a company started in 1999, is doing just that. Among the
challenges that the company tries to address is the display of content a
suitable format-a challenge complicated by the dizzying array of devices,
wireless standards, and applications. MobileWebSurf has introduced a new
wireless multimodal technology that provides automatic content transformation
and delivery on any mobile device using text, voice, graphics, SMS, email, and
other modalities.

WorldMail, the service offered by MWS, is actually a java midlet that is
designed to run on java enabled portable devices. It can be installed using
over-the-air (OTA) provisioning and requires data access services. WorldMail
connects to a back-end MWS email server proxy to access user email accounts.
Users of WorldMail can set up multiple email accounts either through the mobile
device, or through WorldMail's web-interface. In answer to the question on why
mail, Sanjay Sinha, president and CEO, MobileWebSurf quipped, "Some
estimates suggest that e-mail usage this year will be up 35%."

Users
can access their inboxes for either IMAP or POP3 accounts. Users can also access
standard web email accounts such as Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Once in, users can do
everything with their email accounts they can do on their PCs. "For the
user nothing changes, the user experience is very similar to the one delivered
on a desktop," says Sinha, adding that the service is quite safe with the
security built in on the server side.

Sometime last month, MSW signed up with Idea Cellular to provide its users
this service on their handsets. Branded Email-on-Mobile by Idea, the service
will allow users to access mails even while they are in roaming.

Mohit Chhabra

Anytime Anywhere: A Reality

The wireless Internet or cellular operator Cingular Wireless has to deliver
information to handheld device users regardless of where they are and how they
are connected, and in a suitable format.

Most cellular networks are TDMA or second-generation (2G) networks and these
are plagued by a number oproblems such as incompatibility between networks and
slow transfer speeds. Another obstacle that cellular operators face lies in the
mobile   devices themselves, which typically suffer from small displays, limited
memory, limited processing power, low battery power, and greater vulnerability
to inherent wireless network transmission problems.  

One major challenge that cellular service providers had been integrating
disparate content sources. Another challenge is the proliferation of devices,
browsers, and markup languages. For example; markup languages include such
variants as HDML 3.0, WML 1.x for Open Wave, WML 1.x for Nokia, TinyHTML for
PalmPilots, and CHTML for iMode. Different browser features-support for
non-nested tables and images, nested tables but no images, images and nested
tables but only one font size, and so on-compound the problem.  

Creating a compelling user interface that is appropriate for different device
classes is another challenge that cellular operators encountered. For example, a
stock-trading site might want to expose a market research function containing
charts and graphs to a PalmPilot but not to a limited-display cell phone. To
avoid forcing the cell phone user to scroll down numerous lines or navigate
through multiple menus to access desired content, the two devices' information
architecture would have to be drastically different.  

The Solution

MobileWebSurf Product Suite not only solves the challenges faced by the industry
but also provides customers using our services with experience unheard of in the
mobile market. The MobileWebSurf Product Suite comprises of the solution for the
email, data, voice and SMS/MMS spheres of the mobile market.