Standards are the second key to success

The first key to the iPhone’s success is its incredible user-friendliness and ease of use. The second is its emphasis on standards in both video and music. It is still too early to talk about software development, as Apple has not yet opened its phone to third parties other than for web applications. But even there, it is pursuing standards and full support for HTML/CSS/JS.

But as we can see, these are IT standards, and Apple avoids solo initiatives and formats promoted by the telecommunications world, such as BREW, J2ME, and OMA. Why is no one crying over them? Have you noticed that the iPhone does not support WAP? I didn’t notice it either until I started going through the telco standards and listing which ones the iPhone supports. Interestingly, it only supports those related to network operation (such as GSM) – it rejects telecommunications standards that overlap with IT standards. Instead of WAP and WML, only XHTML is used to display mobile pages. Does this make the iPhone worse than the silly Nokia Series 40, which has long supported WAP? No – no one misses WAP, WML is a dead technology, and almost every operator has its own mobile portal in XHTML.

But that means that if the iPhone achieves similar popularity to the iPod, it will really shake things up in the mobile arena. Efforts to monopolize all mobile content on operator portals will be in vain, as music and video will be the same as what is used on computers. Mobile internet will be no different from “normal” internet, even though operators are trying to convince us that the world of mobile internet ends at their portal. This will not be true; it will not end there, because phones coming from the IT world will read everything from the big internet. Do you know how many WAP sites I have visited since I got a phone with S60 and its decent browser (whether Opera or the new built-in Web)? Zero. I visit classic websites. The browser somehow manages to handle them.

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Standards are the second key to success

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