Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I remember reading about Nokia investing in Mozilla's Minimo quite some time ago and that definitely got my attention. I'm really not a big fan of the current browsers available for my phone, so this is great. Unfortunately, it looks like MiniMo will be out on Windows Mobile first, so I don't know how long the wait will be for Symbian. Hmm, there are some nice Windows Mobile phones on eBay...

Phone web browsers have been on my mind a lot recently, and I bet things will start to get really exciting once the mobile browsing experience become acceptable. I'm dealing with issues now with my J2ME phone apps that I haven't dealt with since I moved from writing client apps to web-based apps years ago.

Let me back up a bit...

I've been working on another J2ME app for myself (and possibly any other paranoid people with cellphones). It's basically a front-end to various gov't websites like the USGS/Earthquake site and various Weather alert sites. I wanted quick access to recent earthquakes data, quake maps, storm warnings, tornado alerts, etc.

I'm about halfway through, but I've realized that my approach is flawed. I can't just keep making these specialized mobile apps for myself that are basically "Yet Another Screen Scraper". I don't like having too many apps installed on my phone, and they're getting to be a pain to maintain separately.

I think I've been looking at this incorrectly. My use case isn't entirely mobile. I don't use my phone in a vacuum, it's more like an away vehicle for when I'm not at my desktop at work or my laptop at home. The best example of how I use my phone, is probably how I read blogs. I don't like rss readers on my phone, but prefer to manage my feeds using Bloglines on a real computer and use my phone to just read the content through the browser.

Now I'd like to just get my disaster information directly through my phone's browser, but I really don't like the bulkiness of Opera, NetFront, or Reqwireless. So hopefully MiniMo can pull it off.

In the meantime, I might unify my little apps into one generic thin client and move most of the administration and control onto the webserver.