A project manager walked into our office the other day proudly clutching a new enormous smartphone. And when I say big, I mean big. The Dell Streak, with its 5-inch screen, is far bigger than the average smartphone. Boasting a nice implementation of the Android OS and all the usual features associated with a top smartphone, it’s a great phone.
However, there are any number of questions raised by its release. Firstly, is it acceptable in polite society to point and laugh at people carrying outsize Dom-Joly-esque mobile phones? But perhaps more importantly, what does this do for those faithfully deploying their content to the mobile web? As I see it, you may now have to cater for the following screen sizes or versions when thinking about your web site:
- Basic low-end phones (eg Sony K800)
- Mid-range phones (eg Nokia N95)
- Smartphones (eg iPhone)
- Outsize smartphones (eg the Streak)
- iPad (yep – they still don’t do Flash!)
- Tablet (same size as iPad but with Flash)
- Web (I believe some old-fashioned users still use PCs to access the web)
- Google TV (content may need to be stretched into large format rather than the compression we are used to with mobile!)
It may seem like a pain to have to adapt your content for all these diversifying browsers, but if you take it as a given that you have to take your brand to consumers and their preferred channels, then this is a step you have to take, particularly if your site is sales-driven.
More new screens may pop-up along the way, but I think that the key tasks for any brand are:
- Health-check your site or content on mobile devices – you probably have around 3-4% of your traffic coming from mobiles already
- Ensure your back-end data is ready for syndication to a variety of new platforms
- Get in first – most of your competitors are still not effectively engaging with new channels, so you can steal a march
Posted by Tim Dunn 
