Ewan's Musings

Where's The Mobile Internet?

So my smartphone is the internet in my pocket? I'm not so sure. Although I can finally pick up my email, and browse through a slowly increasing number of WAP sites (both of which are incredibly useful), it's still a long way from the internet.

"Hold on you can put Opera on your phone, what are you wittering about?" I hear you say. Which illustrates my point. The internet is not just about the World Wide Web (although talking to marketing people you'd think that), but about a protocol that allows lots of disparate computers to talk to each other. There are a whole number of apps that use "the internet" that aren't web browsers.

Probably the one I'm using the most just now is IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a collection of computers where what you type on your screen appears on everyone else's screen. Yes it's a chatroom system, but it's not machine specific, it's been around for absolutely ages, and because it doesn't use a browser, the majority of part time surfers just ignore it. You definitly get a better class of people on IRC than you do in Yahoo.

What about the step before that? Telent allows you to connect to a remote computer, be it for single sessions of file transfers and collecting emails, to joining in huge multi-player role playing games (MUD's) and other communities.

If you are used to telnet, why not try an SSH session - that's basically a telent session that is 'secure,' so no-one can read the emails or messages you are browsing on this secure session.

Long before websites and forums were around, you had Usenet. It's still there, seperating of tens of thousands of newsgroups. It's almost like having an email box for each subject you want to read and write about.

All of these services are still out there on the "internet," yet they are left to the third party developer to organise. Ad while there are third party apps (such as WirelessIRC for the Series 60 devices) out there, it's a bit of a cheat advertising the net when it's not all there... is it?