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What Unique Issues Will I Face?

Frankly, many obvious wireless issues—such as user interface, display sizes (or lack thereof), and problems with data entry—haven't yet been solved to a satisfactory degree. Because of these issues, for example, you can pretty much cross off any development tool that offers to somehow parse existing Web content and offer it up for display on a wireless device. Some of these tools work okay for very basic content but don't "scale" to more complicated content or to applications that require input from the user (via text boxes, list boxes, and so on). The bottom line is that mobile users have special application needs. For example, a financial Web site might offer sophisticated graphs, message boards, quotes, and analysis when you enter a stock ticker. But the mobile user simply wants a quote—nothing more. Given the input problems of most mobile devices, a good financial mobile site might even allow the user to enter his favorite stocks via a Web interface. When the user accesses the wireless Web site, his quotes are already preconfigured for him. Rapid information, not glitz and glamour, is the currency of the wireless world. For more on this topic, see Jakob Nielsen's insightful columns on WAP usability topics.

In addition to usability, there are other technical issues. I'll hold off my discussion of specific technologies until Part 2 of this article, but it's important to note that mobile users frequently lose their wireless communications connections—and in many cases don't have them at all. For enterprise applications, in particular, many concepts from the message-queuing and transaction-management worlds have been borrowed (such as store-and-forward messaging and commit/rollback capabilities). Wireless middleware from companies such as Aether Software, Broadbeam, and IBM Pervasive Computing offer to solve many of these issues, but require licensed software to be physically installed on the client handheld or laptop (as opposed to the Web or WAP option, where the clients are truly "thin").

The final—and perhaps thorniest—issue is that of security. Physical security (for example, you left your device in the airport and anyone who picks it up is free to use it) is a real consideration because it's not built into many mobile devices by default. Network security is crucial, as always, but common encryption algorithms such as SSL can severely tax the processing capabilities of an inexpensive handheld. Fortunately, as you might expect, there are solutions to many of these problems from companies such as Certicom.

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