Commons and mobile phones

In order to move the process for a strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation forward, there are the so called "strategic office planning hours". People discuss issues, progress.

We talked about the progress for mobile phone support and, it was said that Commons would be the obvious next candidate for mobile phone support. There are several issues that need to be addressed.

• traffic to and from mobiles is expensive
• there is no standardisation in screen size for mobile phones
• our current strategy of downloading the WHOLE picture to a mobile does not work

From this it is obvious that you want to send a picture that is optimised for a particular make of mobile phone and, when a user wants more detail then that, to zoom in and pan right, left up or down downloading the needed image data as required.

The Djatoka software provides such functionality. It is open source software and, as such it allows for great support for mobile phones. It would not only enable the use of Commons for the mobile phone, it would also improve the support of pictures for mobile Wikipedia.
Thanks,
      GerardM