News came out today about Nokia’s acquisition of Novarra to bring web capabilities to its low end Series 40 handsets.

The article notes that “Nokia presumably believes that, as mobile web activity moves away from downloadable apps into the browser (in theory at least), it should control this strategic piece of software. This makes absolute sense at the high end, where HTML5 and other innovations will start to make the app store less relevant. We cannot see this happening so quickly on slow networks and resource constrained phones – what OEMs and operators need on these platforms is a super-efficient browser and a lot of low end widgets.”.

It’s worth noting that technology platforms such as Opera and Novarra do not offer nearly the same benefits when delivering mobile formatted content, e.g. WAP sites. They are good when browsing ‘normal’ websites designed for PC consumption as they strip out and optimise data being delivered over the wireless network to mobiles, but that’s much less relevant when a website has been designed for mobile consumption. With the unstoppable rise of mobile use, it’s likely that one day there will be more mobile formatted content out there than ‘computer browser’ formatted content.

An underlying point to this being that trying to consume computer browser oriented web content on mobiles is kind of a silly idea as the viewing dimensions and content richness just does not tend to work well on small screens, even on the iPhone. How many iPhone users regularly browse ‘normal’ websites? Not many I suggest. I don’t.

The objectives and the desired experience of mobile content consumption are very different from PC browsing.

Skyfire (www.skyfire) is another start-up in the Opera / Novarra space that is aimed at trying to bring the web as we know it to mobiles. I question the basic objective of trying to stuff computer browser oriented content into a mobile.

We think that what mobile internet users generally want and will use regularly is super fast (on any phone or network), simple to use access to succinct timely information and content designed for the mobile screen and navigation capabilities.

And it must work efficiently on mobile networks, not compelling operators to invest yet more hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in upgrading capacity.

Read this provocative and entertaining read penned by mobile guru Ewan MacLeod over at the Mobile Industry Review

In the meantime, whilst the “painful transition from shitphones (“feature phones”) to smartphone continues”, how can we make internet stuff fast, easy and cheap for a few billion people?

Shout out LOUD……..”2..4..6..8….biNu!”

Listen to this excerpt from a BBC Bizweekly podcast about how the Internet, and even Facebook, helps a farmer in the Rift Valley of Kenya solve crop disease problems, optimize prices for his produce and deal with trespassers on his land. He cycles 10km to the nearest Internet cafe to search Google. Imagine if he could easily, and cheaply, use the mobile internet instead!

There’s a post over at TechCrunch that outlines an innovative technology that brings mobile phone infrastructure to remote rural areas of India. The technology itself sounds great, but the really interesting part of the post was reading accounts from individuals living in remote areas who have just got mobiles, it really is changing their lives. And the numbers quoted are staggering.

Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone.

Keep in mind that India is yet to roll out 3G, and most of the phones are simple cheap handsets. It’s a very different market to what we have in the west.