On-Device Portal - History of On-Device Portals

History of On-Device Portals

On-Device Portal technology emerged in 2000, as operating systems and Java were beginning to be deployed on mobile handsets. One.Tel launched smart on device applications using a combination of Java and SIMtoolkit technology in May 2000. In 2002, four vendors — ActiveSky, SurfKitchen, Action Engine and Trigenix - began developing ODP offerings. In March 2003 at CeBIT O2 demonstrated an ActiveSky powered O2 branded On-Device portal that was both user and operator (remotely) reconfigurable, that same year KDDI deployed an ActiveSky based solution. In 2003, operators including O2, Sonofon and ONE began to deploy ODP solutions. From 2001 to 2005, it was central to many MVNO solutions, as a more cost effective and customer-centric alternative to handset software variants or SIM toolkits, Virtuser developed many trials of these, including a pre-blackberry email service that used Bluetooth in buildings.

Since 2003, On-Device Portal technology has been embraced by mobile operators across the world to compliment WAP-based mobile data services and help operators deliver on the promise of mobile data services. Carriers expected the launch of High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), in which they had invested heavily, to drive robust average revenue per user (ARPU) growth. But despite this investment, the mobile data services market still only represented 19% of global mobile service revenue in 2007. Several factors have been cited for the slow uptake in data services, but poor user experience, based on older browser-based WAP technology, is widely acknowledged as one of the leading reasons.

The browser-based mobile experience is considered difficult and complex, often requiring a user to click multiple times in order to navigate from browsing to downloading or purchasing content. Separately, WAP’s structure, which differs from HTML, has made it difficult for content developers to build efficient content channels.

The On-device portal is also not without complications, supporting wide handset lists is a lot harder to manage than mobile web content, and updating major components is not just a case of re-publishing, but of redistributing applications. At the same time, while it is generally easy to test web content on a handful of browsers, portals need to be tested on nearly every handset which will be expected to use the on-device portal.