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Mobile apps are like your neighborhood produce store. You walk inside the doors looking for specific items. They also typically let users tap into their phone's full potential. For example, a native app might integrate with a phone's camera, voice recorder, contacts or other features. And for shoppers looking for a richer, more advanced interface, applications typically win out over the mobile web because they are designed specifically for that handset's hardware and operating system. Overall, native apps offer a tailored shopping experience that's well delivered but limited. The mobile web on the other hand is a like a huge shopping mall with seemingly limitless stores and tons of options all under one giant roof. It's not as constricted or fragmented as shopping on disparate mobile apps but the experience isn't as tailored as the specialty store. Unlike device-specific native apps though, the mobile web has enormous flexibility and, usually, much larger reach. Customers don't need to download robust programs from app stores to their handset in order to begin shopping. Instead, all they have to do is type in a web address in their mobile browser to start spending their digital dollars. Much of the time mobile sites serve as stripped-down versions of regular websites and serve a utilitarian purpose: selling goods and services.

"Sencha Touch, the first HTML5 mobile JavaScript framework that allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone and Android touchscreen devices, has just hit the big 1.0. And best of all, it's completely free to use."

"A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design. Alpha Release Notes"

Did Apple's unrelenting advertising campaign for the iPod touch as a game machine ("The funnest iPod ever") pay off this holiday season?

The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple's iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google's Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called "full web" browsers (Nokia's S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox's mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users' experiences, giving them access to websites formerly off-limits to most mobile devices. Indeed, as a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report highlighted, mobile devices have increased traffic by an average of 13% across several popular websites.

Helping detect and better serve mobile browsers It's easy to create a mobile website and .mobi domain names are affordable but to make the most of mobile you first need to be able to detect mobile devices! Only then can you start to best serve the needs of your mobile visitors! This PHP function lets you choose how to manage your mobile visitors, they can be redirected to a page built for mobiles or you can use it to decide what to show them.

There is a world of information that we can't immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play and live. The great potential of the mobile web - whether it is delivered by smart phone, automobile navigation system, or other device - is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience. In this way, the mobile web is poised to become the delivery mechanism for a new generation of location-aware applications.

This document specifies Best Practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices. The recommendations refer to delivered content and not to the processes by which it is created, nor to the devices or user agents to which it is delivered. It is primarily directed at creators, maintainers and operators of Web sites. Readers of this document are expected to be familiar with the creation of Web sites, and to have a general familiarity with the technologies involved, such as Web servers and HTTP. Readers are not expected to have a background in mobile-specific technologies.

Welcome to the weekend Web, where people are spending a bigger slice of time online via wireless devices - and using a different set of sites than during the workweek. "At Google, we see the majority of our desktop traffic [in the US] during weekdays," says Matt Waddell, chief of staff for Google Mobile. "On mobile, the situation is completely reversed." Mobile browsing surged 89% in the past year, with mobile page views increasing by 127%, according to researcher M:Metrics. The increase reflects growing availability of all-you-can eat data plans and increasingly sophisticated handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone.

Analysys said that most of the growth will not happen until after 2010, when the technical and market environment for mobile media and entertainment is expected to improve.

Over at mBricks my colleagues have put a lot of work into the device database (we work with WURFL data and contribute back as well as we can). I took the opportunity to take a closer look at screen size trends. The data I have covers about 400 different device models sold from 2005 to today.

The Apple iPhone is easily the most publicized new mobile device in recent memory. But despite all the discussion about the product, there's relatively little hard information available to the public on its impact. How is it being used? What effect is it having on customers and on the technology industry?

News for User Interface Design, Human Computer Interface (HCI, Human Factors, & Usability from Usernomics.

You can create Mobile Sitemaps using the Sitemap protocol. You can do this manually or you can use our Sitemap Generator. If you plan to use a third-party tool, you should check to see that it can create Mobile Sitemaps.

I've seen many prototypes of mobile UIs that can't be built and if they could, would not be legible on a small LCD screen. So I thought I'd provide some pointers that might help those of you that is starting out. Often, people starting out prototyping mobile phone UIs get the size of the display right but the size of the font wrong. They try to stuff way too much in there, and they use a font size and font family that is not available in the phone.