1) Authentication is a real pain, partially because the operating system in a hand-held is not the same as the desk-top client. I find it very difficult to get access to client intranets on my laptop in my office, let alone on the move and on a handset

2) There is an issue with mobiles over session state. If you are working on a download and the signal drops maintaining the session is very difficult to manage. If it was not you could lose a call going through a tunnel and pick it up the other end, and we all know that is desirable but not currently possible.

3) Search becomes interesting, because of legibility issues apart from anything else. Search could be easier because the mobile device knows where you are through the cell coordinates and through GPS and could insert metadata into the query to help with filtering the results. ISYS-Search and Autonomy are doing a lot of work in this area

Martin White
Intranet Focus

For example, a PDA might be running a crummy browser. While a smaller feature phone might have Opera Mini. A media query might give the PDA the full website, which it cannot handle even though it has a larger screen. Also, a media query might give the smaller screen a lesser website, when it could handle the full version.

It’s putting a choice into the hands of the people least able to choose. The UA knows what it can do, the author does not.

As such, the good old media="handheld" attribute still seems optimal for giving different styles to different media.

Also, bear in mind that media queries don’t send a separate website to mobiles. It’s exactly the same website, just a different stylesheet.

If you send a cut-down mobile site to all devices, then tune it with media queries, the ever-growing number of handhelds which can browse full websites are still left out.