When Symbian was formed 10 years ago, it inherited a browser from Psion. In the following years, the ability to browse real Web pages became a key differentiator of smartphones as compared to feature phones, and so Web technologies have played an important role in the story of Symbian. At the time of Symbian’s formation, there was much debate in the industry on whether the future of personal and enterprise computing would be in thick or thin clients – that is, in rich client software running mainly on the phone, or software hosted on a network server with a fairly simple browsing terminal. Ten years later and we see AJAX blurring the gap between the notion of thin and thick clients with rich browsing terminals backed with colossal arrays of servers dishing out email, photos, twitters and Facebook messages.

To summarize, early mobile Web browsers provided poor user experience and low bandwidth, with initiatives such as WAP failing to deliver compelling content to match the expectation of a mobile Web. The situation has greatly improved recently, and now that devices such as the Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone provide very capable desktop-grade browsers, content providers are starting to produce simpler, mobile versions of their sites in order to improve the user experience (for example, see Facebook and Google’s applications).

The WebKit-based Web browser looks likely to become the de facto standard for mobile Web. Aside from its adoption into the Symbian ecosystem as part of S60, WebKit also provides the engine for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

The unification of desktop and mobile browsing, combined with acknowledgment that different devices benefit from different layouts, provides a compelling vision of a standards-based mobile Web of the future. With this review of the last 10 years of mobile Web on Symbian OS complete, let us now turn to the main topic of this paper: a practical look at using AJAX on Symbian OS-based devices.

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