Smartphone's Dirty Secret

Come on, Steve. Who cares about the browser? We need plug-ins! Can you play Facebook videos on the iPhone? The dirty secret of the iPhone and many other smartphones out there is that they do not have and never will have fully usable browsers. No matter how much CPU power and RAM you cram into a slim device, those browser, plug-in and extension developers have multi-core desktop power guzzlers in mind when they add new features to their software. And capabilities of smartphones will always be behind those of desktop and laptop machines. Right?

Wrong! There is, indeed, a way to make smartphones shine and be every bit as capable as desktops and laptops. This can be accomplished by making the smartphone dumb, as in a dumb client. Moving the processing power into the cloud will enable the Web browser on the smartphone to be "fully usable," as Steve says.

"Dumb" smartphones (what an oxymoron) with all the "smarts" in the network will solve another problem that people have with browsers on phones: they are always out of sync with other Web browsers on their netbooks, laptops, desktops, etc., Think about, are all your Web browsers exactly the same on the different devices you use? It's time that we stop emailing ourselves interesting links to be viewed at home and trying to remember passwords we saved on our work computers. One person - one browser, regardless of the device being used at work, home or the road!

The browser must run on a server in the cloud, utilizing the graphical display and audio of the device.

And think of the wonders it will make to conserve bandwidth in the networks clogged by smartphone-based browsers. Instead of pulling across the wireless network the huge JPEGs and streaming MPEGs designed to look good on your 32" widescreen monitor, the hosted browser does this over the backbone to the data center, where the image and data will be scaled to the size of the client at hand.

SIMtone is ready to make this happen. It's time wireless carriers realize that this is the next big opportunity to free themselves from the tyranny of smartphone vendors, unclog their networks and deliver what every user wants: fully usable HTML browsers that don't suck on phones.