Unlike most mobile phone users, I browse on my phone and I'm able to use a varity of handsets from all the major carriers on a regular basis. Most of my personal browsing involves checking trusted news sources and favorite blogs. My latest primary phone provides an experience which is pretty good, but certainly still too wonky for my spouse or mom to give it a try.

MEdia Net 3.0 (the version number won't be used in consumer communication & marketing) has addressed some of the key obstacles that keep my family from joining the 20 million US subscribers who browse each month according to M:Metrics data. The bet that Cingular has made is that three core changes will drive increased usage and satisfaction with mobile browsing:
(1) The deck has been flattened,
(2) The home page has user-customizable substance, and
(3) Ohmygod, there's a search box!

Flattening the Deck

Cingular has done something simple here, but very useful: They've flattened the heirarchy of deck categories and pushed content (not just links) onto each topical page. Sprint and Verizon have pursued similar approaches to some extent and you'll find headlines, for example, at the top of the news category for each carrier. The deck flattening is the least innovative of the changes in MEdia Net but it's something that needed to happen and fit s well with the philosophy that drove what I consider to be the more interesting changes.

A Customizable Home Page
Finally. In a world where people are used to being in control of the Web browsing experience, mobile browsing has always been a frustrating beast, particulary if you are stuck accessing content through a carrier portal. The disconnect between how people use their personal computer and how carriers force us to use our mobile phone is vast. MEdia Net doesn't eliminate this gap, but it shows how it can be closed.

The MEdia Net homepage brings content right to the top, in the form of user-customizable "bubbles." The default settings include a bubble with local weather information(keyed to the billing zip code) and a national news story. Each has a link to deeper weather and news content. The page is rounded out with a list of content categories, and a search box (see below).

What sets MEdia Net apart is the presence of an EDIT button that lets a phone owner configure up to five bubbles and decide which portal content categories to include or exclude. Oh, and did I mention that a subscriber can configure a bubble to include any website they want?? While on the Web this My Yahoo!-styled customization is old hat, very Web 1.0, it's unheard of for a US mobile carrier to give its customers such flexibility.

Cingular has smartly decided to embrace RSS to provide its content feeds, which means that subscribers can expect more frequent updates to content than has typically been the case. It hasn't been unusual to discover portal content that ends up being relatively static and stale expect this to change. It's not yet possible to add just any RSS feed to a MEdia Net bubble, just a URL. This is too bad, but as Cingular takes these initila steps toward opening up the browsing experience I hope they'll soon see the logic in allowing subscribers this flexibility.

Finally, A Search Box (Almost)
At the bottom of the MEdia Net homepage (and every category section), is a search box; InfoSpace is providing both the search functionality and powering the overall MEdia Net portal.

The search box currently allows you free text searching and returns results clustered by type of result, with the results it anticipates you want most posted right at the top. If you plug in an airline flight number, you'll get flight status information at the top. If you type in an musical artist you can be assured that ringtones from Cingular's catalog will be at the top of the results. This is not a bad thing as it certainly beats trying to navigate through a tree of ringtone genres, if in fact I'm looking for a ringtone.

Adding a ubiquitous search box is a great step forward, and I think that the attempt to provide structured results makes sense int he mobile environment. What's missing though, is the ability to search off portal; today MEdia Net searches will only return results related to Cingular storefronts and partner content.

I haven't had a chance to look into the press coverage that this announcement has received, but the few pieces I did see highlighted the MEdia Net Live Ticker service. Live Ticker is easily understood as a mobile implementation of PointCast and on a mobile phone it works very well. I'm told we'll see a broader distribution of Live Ticker on new devices in in mid-2006, but at the moment it's limited to the Motorola v557.

Meanwhile, the less flashy but very useful MEdia Net enhancements described above were rolled out today to over 150 devices with the promise that 30 million Cingular customers will have this improved experience by the end of the year. As much fun as the flash is, the market will move forward and mobile data will become ubiquitous only if carriers make broad improvements in the day to day experiences that typical mobile subscribers, as Cingular has done today.

And today's carriers better hop to it, because I expect that the MVNOs waiting in the wings, notably AMP'd and Helio, are planning on redefining what consumers should expect from their mobile phone provider.