Mobile browsing and the mobile enterprise

In researching this week’s story on the new generation of mobile Web browsers, one word kept coming up to describe the experience of both users and IT staff: painful. (There’s also a slideshow with screen shots from several of these browsers.) Microbrowsers were often awkward to use and limited in the content they could access, and the content had to be separately created and maintained. Someone aptly dubbed mobile browsers as “second class citizens” on the Internet. And that goes a long way in explaining why, apart from laptops, most of the enterprise mobile deployments I’ve covered to date typically have native application running on a handheld computer. In addition, wireless networks were slower, more unreliable, and a lot of the applications needed to be used offline. Those conditions are changing, at least somewhat. Given that evolution, these emerging “full Web” mobile browsers now make it possible to extend the Web and corporate intranets to a far wide array of enterprise handhelds than ever before. And that seems to be fit in with the enterprise trend toward service-oriented architectures (SOAs). What’s been the mobile browsing experience of your enterprise users? Of yourself? Have you done anything yet to exploit this mobile Web capability? Are you planning to in the future? Do you see this as a real advance or just one more fad? Do you forsee specific security problems?