A Study of Mobile Internet Capability Trends to Assess the Effectiveness of the W3C Default Delivery Context (DDC)

The mobile Internet is becoming increasingly popular, but the usability of many Web applications provides a negative mobile Internet experience. This paper researched the Internet capabilities of Web-enabled mobile phones through statistics generated using the R programming environment with data sourced from MobileAware’s Device Description Repository (DDR). Time series analysis and measures of location were applied to the data set. Hands-on testing using selected mobile browsers were carried out to backup and prove findings. The data set contained 1384 device descriptions from LG, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson mobile phones that have a browser capable rendering XHTML Basic 1.0 or better. The results of the research were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the W3C Default Delivery Context (DDC) and recommendations were proposed to adjust parts of the specification to improve end user experience and give developers more flexibility when designing mobile Internet applications. Five of the eight DDC recommendations were adjusted and presented as an Enhanced Delivery Context (EDC). Keywords: mobile Internet, mobile browsers, DDC, EDC