The mobile web, the web in your hand (or whatever you want to call it), has had more abortive starts than my old Nissan Sunny, god rest its soul. Time and again the hubris of the mobile operators has got the better of them, they promised the moon on a stick but sadly download speeds were too slow, data packets too large, sites unwieldy and hard to navigate around, and, most importantly, prices were too high and tariffs unfathomable.

This generally gave everyone the perception that it just wasn't worth accessing the net from your phone, you might as well wait until you get home; at least everyone knows where they are with broadband. And from a site owner’s point of view, the proliferation of different handsets on the market makes it nigh on impossible to design a site which will render well on all phones.

Well, it looks as if things are finally coming together. Initiatives like .mobi are galvanising the industry to move towards standardisation, making mobile sites more user-friendly, faster and cheaper to download. And the operators have also got the message, offering flat-rate, broadband-like tariffs which are easy-to-understand, or transparent. Hot on the heels of T-Mobile and Orange, Vodafone this week launched its own web portal service, imaginatively entitled Vodafone Mobile Internet – wonder how many marketing man hours that one took to dream up.

It looks good though, and from a web owner’s perspective, it automatically renders fixed web pages into a format that makes them easy to read and navigate on a handset. Not that it’s perfect, while I was told it can intelligently decide to put things like log-in boxes at the top of a page, the IT Week site displayed in an unusual order, beginning not with the main headline stories but less interesting areas of the site. Either way though this technology, if it generally works, could be a differentiator for Vodafone as it means firms don’t have to spend time and money designing their own mobile sites if they don’t want to, although it would probably make sense to do so if they want to reach the broadest number of consumers possible.

Another thing to look out for with this service is a special localisation capability which firms can (wait for it) leverage to their advantage. Vodafone uses its network of base stations to triangulate the geographical location of individual handsets, so that more relevant content can then be pushed to the user. Happy customers, more revenue-making opportunities, more responsive web sites – everyone’s a winner.