Anyone involved in designing and building websites back in the early 90’s remembers how difficult it was to get your site working across browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. While this is still a challenge today, it’s not nearly as bad as it was. Now, imagine this problem compounded times 1,000. This is where we are with the mobile internet. There are a couple of ways of detecting what’s referred to as the User Agent, which is the string that the devices browser creates to let us know things like the make and model of the handset, the screen size, the browser, etc. Both are clunky, unreliable and time-consuming to implement. I just read that Verizon will deploy the Flash Lite plug-in on their handsets. I don’t know why this has taken so long to come about, and when will the other carriers jump onboard? Flash Lite can easily work in place of across-the-board standards and compliance.

What do you think about the current state of the mobile Internet? How might we improve it?