An April 19th article in Information Week discusses the rise in the use of mobile phones to access the web. The trend is stronger in Japan than either the United States or Canada (no surprise there); nevertheless, over one quarter of mobile users have used their phones to access the internet, according to the article.
The growth of internet-ready devices with small screens–whether video iPods, mobile phones, or “traditional” handhelds like PDAs–has implications for the kind of web design we do and the level of flexibility we need behind the scenes to ensure that everyone can use our websites. This is closely tied to accessibility for people with disabilities, which I’ll talk more about in a future post.
The article also mentions that text messaging is “the most popular mobile and wireless activity” (I think they actually mean most popular after using a mobile to make a phone call). Text messaging is a way to send short messages of up to 160 characters asynchronously to mobile phones.
If you’re interested in reading more about text messaging, blogwithoutalibrary.net has a useful summary of a CIL presentation on the topic by John Iliff of PALINET, including links to some libraries that are offering text messaging reference services.