Mobile applications: a peek in the future of mobile web

Big kids on the web are starting to experiment with mobile applications: Downloaded to your phone, those applications can give you a much better user experience.

• Google is leading the way with gmail,
• Google Maps (editor’s choice ; highly recommended),
• And others …
• Yahoo Go! brings you most Yahoo Apps to your mobile.
• Microsoft is in too with Windows Live Search
• And a beta version of Windows Live Messenger.

EBay and MySpace lauched commercial services.

Are those applications a major move on the market? Definitely. Does this mean mobile web sites are dead before popular? Nope.

Mobile applications can not compete with mobile sites when you need 100% coverage of your users and they are a lot more expensive to develop (think: java, symbian, windowsmobile, brew, etc).

What they bring is a peek in what mobile sites experience should be when phone browsers are advanced enough. This day is getting close as iPhone applications developpers are expected to write their application using W3C standards.