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Fidelity Blurs the Line Between Desktop and Mobile Apps

Fidelity's mobile application improvements include intuitive navigations and shortcuts for investors who can only use one hand.

Mobile applications will be the predominant way people want to handle their investments in the future, according to Joe Ferra, chief wireless officer at Fidelity. "It's just so convenient as the technology continues to evolve and devices get more sophisticated," he says.

While in 2005 and 2006 most of the feedback Fidelity got from mobile customers was complaints -- inability to get coverage, trouble accessing the Fidelity Web site, difficulties with the services -- in 2007 that started to change. The mutual fund giant saw users become more sophisticated and comfortable with its mobile services, and customers started asking to do the same things on their mobile devices that they can do on Fidelity.com.

"We're taking a lot of the things you do on the desktop and moving them to mobile," Ferra says. "We provide market data, quotes, research and news, after-hours trading, options trading, and more things over mobile devices than most people would suspect. But they want more."

A big driver for this trend has been the iPhone, Ferra says. "I believe the iPhone has been incredible for the industry," he says. "It has changed people's perception of a phone. They no longer look at it as a voice device, they look at it as a way to retrieve data."

Further, Ferra can envision the day when the average American -- who today leaves the house with three items: car keys, cell phone and wallet -- will use his or her cell phone in place of all three. Chips in handheld devices will be swiped to handle payments and unlock car doors.

Support for All Devices

A primary chore for Ferra's group has been to deal with "technology fragmentation" -- in other words, to deliver data and applications smoothly to a variety of devices, including BlackBerrys, iPhones and Windows Mobile phones. "There are so many devices in the marketplace, you don't want to find yourself designing or developing things to target just one device," he says.

In the early days of Web-enabled cell phones, customers would try typing www.fidelity.com into their phone browsers and see an inch of the upper left-hand corner of Fidelity's Web site -- "a real dissatisfier," Ferra says. In the 1990s his group developed browser detection technology that allowed the firm to recognize that a user was coming in from a mobile device and redirect the user to Fidelity Anywhere, the firm's mobile delivery platform.

Recently Fidelity has created device detection, which determines not only that the user is coming in through a handheld device, but which device and even which network, so that the data and graphics can be reformatted to take best advantage of the device's screen size, keyboard type and layout. For example, to a high-resolution device like the iPhone, Fidelity Anywhere will deliver candlestick charts. "Here's where we've gotten a little more intelligent on the back end to render what we think is most appropriate for that user," Ferra says. Fidelity has also made the fonts a little larger for its iPhone applications and provided a downloadable icon that iPhone and BlackBerry users can use to get one-click access to Fidelity Anywhere.

"A few years ago, each wireless carrier had a portal called a 'walled garden' that would identify what they thought were good providers for a given category," Ferra relates. For weather, for instance, they would serve up weather.com. Today users are escaping from the walled gardens and exploring the World Wide Web on their own. "We're seeing a big trend away from the walled garden, which again suggests the user is getting more sophisticated," he says.

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