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"Going Mobile. Local executive carves niche as national expert on fast-growing banking-industry technology trend" - Scott Olson, Indianapolis Business Journal (IBJ)

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Sunday, April 20, 2008

Browsers & Carriers for Mobile Banking

When you begin to think about testing a browser-based mobile banking application you need to carefully consider which handsets to validate; however, that's typically the last step. So, where do you begin? Here's my recommendation:

1) Determine which carriers you want to validate. Obviously you want to start with the big 5 (ATT, Verizon, Sprint, Alltel and T-Mobile) but don't forget to also consider any local or regional players.

2) Determine which browsers are most critical to you. At a minimum consider the following: Blackberry, Blazer (Palm), Mobile/Pocket IE, Nokia, Opera & Opera Mini, Safari, NetFront, and Openwave. Quick Note: Openwave is the most widely sold browser of all time, but you will rarely if ever hear someone claim to be running the product. It appears that handset manufacturers simply purchase and re-brand the product.

3) Determine the handsets. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. The challenge is trying to determine which handsets need to be tested on the respective carriers in order to cover all of the possible browser/carrier combinations. Additionally, I'd recommend taking it one step further and also cross referencing the handsets your clients are carrying. How do you accomplish that? Good old fashioned primary research - I'll cover that in another post.

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