Opinion

To celebrate our new office move, the 51Degrees team took to the streets of Reading for an evening filled with tasty food and beverages. We stopped off at the handmade burger Co restaurant that was recently opened in Reading at the start of the year. We all had a great experience, with fantastic food and a great environment; however, there was something that left a sour taste in our mouth.

Review the slides from my recent web seminar with Kentico on the Future Web Design – Mobiles, Tablets, TVs and Glasses.

Responsive Web Design allows designers to implement web pages which work equally well on different types of devices. Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) media queries enable the CSS used to control the page look and feel to be altered based on screen size, and other properties of the device when the page is being rendered on the browser. Responsive Design works really well with simple web pages containing elements that are implemented consistently across the major browser vendors.

The weather outside may be a typically damp British April - but here at 51Degrees.mobi there's not a cloud in the sky. We've developed a mobile device detection solution that doesn't rely on a ‘cloud' connection every time there's a new visitor to your mobile web site.

As far as we're concerned, cloud services are very well-suited to location-based services and other applications that require vast quantities of data. They're also often a practical solution when information needs to be shared but needs to be controlled or monitored as well.

However, mobile device detection is a completely different type of situation.

51Degrees.mobi strongly believes that one size doesn't fit all. It's the reason we created our own mobile device description repository, which enables web designers to create a site that'll adapt automatically for visitors using mobile phones.

However, it's important to realise that a choice of just two sizes can also be less than ideal. With consumers now using portable internet-connected devices that range from feature phones to iPads, simply deciding whether or not a handset is ‘mobile' isn't always enough.

If I see a street sign that says The Close, I'd expect the road to be a cul-de-sac. If it's called The Crescent, I'd expect it to be curved. The Boulevard may well have a central reservation. And the High Street will probably have shops. Not always but often.

Every year, TheFonecast.com offers its mobile industry predictions for the following twelve months. In December, I joined Iain Graham and Mark Bridge to offer my forecast for 2012.

More recently, I was invited by GoMo News to share further details about some of those thoughts... including the potential decline of Apple's mobile market share and the growth of Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.

This year's CES event in Las Vegas promises to be the biggest yet. But it's not just the event that's getting bigger.