Developing for mobile devices

Good article in UKOLN's Ariadne on developing for mobile devices http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/massam-et-al/#16 Lots of useful links and tips, and some nice quotes from students

Basically reaffirms that students will use mobile devices for the web when it's cheap enough, quick enough, and when screens are big enough to let them see what's going on ... and popular wisdom suggests that we are reaching this point.

Students also seemed to be saying that they would use the mobile internet to check (and possibly discover) rather than to consume (or possibly create). My hunch is that users will want to be able to duck into mobile interfaces to perform a distinct task - checking a reference, renewing a book, finding a library - and then duck out again.

The minimal startup time for mobile devices compared to laptops/desktops means that I often check something on a mobile even when I have access to a "proper" computer. For fact checking, the advantages of a proper keyboard/big screen don't outweigh that interminable wait for the whole thing to get going.

I use a laptop/desktop if I need to write anything longer than a tweet, or read anything longer than a (short) article - which I may have discovered on my mobile.

Providing library content on mobile devices is another matter, particularly as most of our electronic content is accessed via third party interfaces.