Hi, My Name is Luca Passani and I manage the WURFL open-source project (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net).

Here is a Nokia 6288 on the vodafone UK network:

user-agent = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 MG (Novarra-Vision/6.1)
accept = text/html;q=1.0, text/css; q=1.0, application/x-javascript; q=1.0, text/plain;q=0.8, application/xhtml+xml;q=0.6, application/x-httpd-php;q=0.1, */*;q=0, image/gif; q=1.0, image/jpeg; q=1.0, image/png; q=1.0
accept-charset = ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
accept-language = en
accept-encoding = identity;q=1.0, gzip;q=0.1, *;q=0
x-novarra-device-type = 0
x-device-user-agent = Nokia6288/2.0 (05.94) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1
x-mobile-gateway = Novarra-Vision/6.1 (VF-UK; Server-Only)
via = HTTP/1.1 glgwsl11 (XMG 724Solutions HTG XMG-31_VODAFONE_M3_B030 20070724.091400), 1.1 Novarra (Vision/6.1), 1.1 frankenstein1:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE9-20070214)
cache-control = max-age=259200
connection = keep-alive

How bad is this? this isn't even a Symbian phone. It's a Nokia series 40! How can you disguise this as a desktop browser?

Also, what happened to the UAprof header? that was introduced by OMA (i.e. operators and device manufacturers) explicitly to allow operators and content owners to customize their content to device capabilities. You new gateway simply removes all of that. This is an abuse. I bought my phone so that I could go to site that can send me content for my phone! what Vodafone is doing is either illegal or it SHOULD be.

What would you do if your ADSL provider was turning your HTTP requests to look like Netscape 4? you would probably change ADSL provider. Unfortunately, changing operator is not nearly a simple (too many other services that come with one's subscriptions) yet, one can only point out the arrogance.

finally, let me provide my perspective as a end-user. I may be OK going to a reformatting service for this or that site, BUT generally speaking reformatted websites are mostly unusable on feature phones, so I do not understand how you can force this on all of your users without their permission.

Dear vodafone, this is not what I call being an advanced mobile internet provider, this is about Novarra bamboozling vodafone into believing that there are shortcut to the mobile internet.

Luca

for the record, I do not have a standard background. I did try to work with W3C, but the way standard bodies work did not leave me too happy.
You can refer to this for details:

http://www.passani.it/gap/intro.htm

which is the background to my GAP document, which tries to give developers the right message, something that what W3C has egregiously failed to do:

http://www.passani.it/gap/

To make a long story short, it is my opinion that mixing web and mobile internet only means making mobile development even more complicated than it already is.

Anyway, I am not here to talk about me. I am here to bring my contribution and help the industry turning the mobile internet into a developer platform. Vodafone's initiatives goes into the opposite direction. *You are fragmenting the platform*.

So, you say that the comments so far are very positive. Really? you must have heard different comments than the ones I heard, because the ones I heard are very negative, and I am referring to comments from everyone I talked to, including developers, bloggers and, hear hear, people from vodafone too. Can you point to one of your positive comments? I am curious...

> Other Global companies are driving forward with
> Content Adaptation solutions with a similar mission

yeah, it's one of the many trends in the industry, but it's pretty much failing everywhere. Your regular user does not care about hitting the web with a feature phone. Too slow. Too hard to use. Can't be bothered.

Best Regards

Luca

Quoting: "I am monitoring the customer usage of the service and I can tell you firmly that your statement is not the case. Customers do want to use the WWW internet and daily usage and customer volumes are increasing."


Brian, Vodafone associated the launch of the adaptation framework with the one-pound per 5Megs offer, which explains the positive response by the customer.
The day you measure the popularity of sites built specifically for mobile vs generic adapted web sites AND the same cheap billing for data traffic, you will see mobile sites win hadns-down. That's assuming Vodafone has allowed developers the possibility to build mobile sites (i.e. recognize the device through the user-agent string).

Luca

"We are open for suggestions in working with both web and mobile specific content.
To date we haven't had any detailed suggestions from this forum on the handling of both.
I would like this threaded discussion to move to a proactive discussion to options where mobile and web content work in harmony and not get stuck in the past of working solely with mobile specific content. That era has gone."

Brian, now you are being unfair here. The suggestion has been there, very clear and very simple for you guys to implement. Let the user-agent string alone!!! it is not yours, it's never been and you have no right to change it while it travel from people's phone to developers' services. It's a theft!

The user-agent string is what developers need to provide superior user experience in their site. The message from developers is loud and clear. DO NOT TOUCH the USER-AGENT STRING!

When you say "working solely with mobile specific content" you are offending our intelligence, because Vodafone behavior is enforcing mobile adaptation *solely* and not anything else. You won't get away with this so easily by playing with words.

This is a constructive, unambiguous message you are receiving from developers around the world. Trying to change the subject won't fool anyone. You and Vodafone are guilty of arrogant and abusive behavior.


Luca Passani

Hi Mark

Thanks for your comments.

Since the launch of the "Mobile Internet" it hasn't been Vodafone's intention to stop of block any mobile site.

This is why the whitelist was created to allow for mobile site access.

Vodafone live! remains as a Premium mobile content offering with Vodafone partners.

Customers can now go off portal which is something I personally have wanted as a customer to do for many years now and many others are now enjoying too.

We are open for suggestions in working with both web and mobile specific content.

To date we haven't had any detailed suggestions from this forum on the handling of both.

I would like this threaded discussion to move to a proactive discussion to options where mobile and web content work in harmony and not get stuck in the past of working solely with mobile specific content. That era has gone.

I welcome any technical suggestions that others have that can be debated or discussed as either features or suggestions for the standards forums.

BR
Brian

Hi Atrasatti

Many thanks for your suggestions.

This is the type of debate I would like here where you are proposing solutions in a world where mobile , web content and adaptation proxies co-exist. This is the new environment we are in.

Not quite sure what you meant by KHTML? Was that a typo?

I'll pass your suggestion on internally.

Good stuff.

BR
Brian

Andrea

Ok thanks for the link .On the topic of your comment.

"SUPPORT the idea that Vodafone (or any other network operator) provides a tool such as this adapting proxy, but the user should be able to say "I want to use" or "Thank you, no". As of today, you can avoid the proxy using a different APN that we all know it too complex for most users.

This is built into the service already. The user has the choice at service start-up to "allow Vodafone to adapt sites" "Not allow Vodafone" to adapt sites when they start the service. They can also change their settings under "Web Preferences".

They can also at any time select "Unmodified" at the bottom footer of any web page and get the unmodifed page and by the way this allows the user agent header to be passed. For example go to the www.bbc.co.uk brings the HTML back (Rendered) and if you select Unmod you get the mobile version of the site as the user agent is passed through.If there is no mobile version of the site the full HTML comes back and it is up to the phone to cope with that.

BR
Brian