dotMobi database to help mobile developers

The group that promotes and manages the mobile-phone top-level domain, dotMobi is publishing a list of specifications for virtually all phones on the market in a bid to make life easier for developers.

While such lists are available from other companies, this one will be cheaper, making it more accessible to smaller developer companies and individuals, said Paul Nerger, vice president of advanced services and applications for dotMobi.

Unlike the PC market, where most computers and widely used browsers comply with accepted standards, mobile phones each have different specifications and attributes. Developers must tweak their applications and content for different phones, even those running the same operating systems, so that the content fits onto the phone screen and applications work properly on phones that might not have certain capabilities.

In the United States, the same phone might even have different requirements based on the operator that sells it, since service providers sometimes disable features. That makes it hard for developers to build applications that can be used by a very wide population of phone owners.

While dotMobi’s list doesn’t solve that problem, it does make it easier for developers to identify characteristics of phones and deliver applications to them that will work well. That should encourage more mobile development, Nerger said. “Our job is to make the mobile ‘Net happen,” he said.

The database will be free for anyone to view and browse. Developers can also choose to buy dotMobi’s device detection software, which they can use to detect attributes of phones that are connecting to their Web pages in order to deliver content and services that best suit the devices. The price for that was set to cover costs for dotMobi, Nerger said. Developers will pay $99 a year for the software; dotMobi customers will pay $79.

DotMobi first announced that it was developing the list, which aims to include phones for sale worldwide, in the middle of last year and originally intended to release it at the end of 2007.

One developer of a similar list thinks the dotMobi effort will be good for smaller developers, but likely won’t meet the needs of bigger companies. Mobile Research maintains a database of all phones sold in the United States. Workers there actually buy each phone, testing them for more than a thousand different attributes, said David Adams, the founder of Mobile Research.

Subscribers to the list, such as mobile Web sites, mobile application developers, and content providers, plug it into their databases so that when a phone hits their sites, they can deliver the formatted site or content to fit the phone.

Subscribers pay upward of $10,000 per year for the list, which is continually updated.

dotMobi is compiling its list by collecting information from a variety of sources, including phone makers such as Nokia and operators such as Vodafone. It will also use the data available from WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File), an open source project that compiles information about phones around the world, collected from users and developers. dotMobi isn’t planning to buy and individually test each phone, so Adams suspects the list won’t cover as many attributes as his.

Mobile Research counts Microsoft, Google, and T-Mobile among its customers.