Apple, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Android - who is respecting current mobile web standards, in these highly competing times on Appstores? I am a big fan of standards, my previous company over the term of its 6 year existence did so many ports of applications for different devices, that it could maybe be up to 100 000 unique ports for unique handsets… It was horrible, and we couldn’t do anything to work with it.

What am I refering to specifically? I am refering to the W3 location standard, which is currently supported by Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android). But both these platforms support different standards - Google supports it via Gears.

Now Nokia has an interesting story - they don’t support the geo-location API, but they do in their widgets (Web Runtime Widgets). (Updated 11:40): We have received a direct comment from Nokia, that the standard in the Web Runtime Widgets is the same as the W3 location standard (we mentioned it was not) - which is supported from S60 5th Edition and newest S60 3.2 SW releases. Also, we should stay tuned for browser support. More details on the Nokia API here.

All this together makes creating location mobile web applications nearly impossible at this stage for more platforms, and makes it very complicated.

So this is my call - mobile device manufacturers - please unify this.

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