T-Mobile Goes To The Other Extreme: Open Mobile Internet For All

Wireless

from the a-bit-too-far... dept

For years, we’ve been saying that, eventually, the “mobile internet” and the regular internet would merge completely — causing lots of trouble for those firms who were betting on limited paid content on mobile phones (and making the idea of a separate mobile domain pointless). People would just route around them and use the full internet. While some operators insisted that people would be nuts to want to surf the internet on their phones, it looks like T-Mobile has gone to the other extreme. Carlo is pointing out that T-Mobile is ditching its mobile portal in Europe and will just offer up Google as the standard mobile home page. While it’s good to see an operator not just tear down the walls, but also lay out a red carpet to the internet, it’s not entirely clear that this is the best move either. Surfing the internet on a mobile phone is still something of a different experience, and people won’t necessarily use it for the same reasons or in the same way. It’s great that Google and the rest of the web is easily accessible, but there are situations where it might help to make other tools available as well. Perhaps the real solution would be to give users much more control over what they use as their own “portal,” whether it’s just Google, or some easily created navigation tools that they setup themselves.