It is interesting to see the list of companies who have come together to ask ICANN to portion out a new top-level domain (TLD) for use with mobile phones.
Nokia, Vodaphone, Microsoft, H-P, Orange, Samsung and 3 others.
Who isn’t on that list is more interesting than who is.
New Domain Is Proposed [nytimes.com]
I wish they’d take into account how many keystrokes it’d take to put in the domain on a telephone keypad. MOB is 7 keystrokes, PHO is 6, while something like PMD is only 3 (and you could claim that PMD stands for personal mobile device). Heck, even WAP would work in 3 keystrokes although they’d never pick it after its demise as a standard.
Most phones (at least in Japan) have one key assigned to common shortcuts such as http://, www, .com, and so forth while in text-input mode, so that might be one way to nix that issue.
There’s obviously a sneaking suspicion that this is an attempt to gather Operating System A sites under one TLD as a branding exercise, though. I’d hate to be going to .mob sites and finding that I can’t view them because my device happens not to have the right flavour OS.