On the 'hate' factor... I would guess the strong feelings come from people who think more like webmasters than domainers... I am both. I have been designing websites since the early days (1996 or so). Being somewhat of a web geek I get the point when Tim Berners-Lee talks about device independent web.
That being said most webdesigners (or the average layman) have no clue when it comes to concepts such as browser-agnostic design, liquid layout or advanced content negotiation techniques... but when you do it's clear that the whole mobi scheme is not convincing at all from a technical point of view and preys upon the ignorant. That is precisely why the whole mobi concept is alien to me
Now playing the devil's advocate: I see both encouraging trends but there are also some disturbing facts that should not be overlooked. Nonetheless the .mobi 'market' looks as volatile as Worldcom stocks to me :o
Question: do the mobi backers have any tricks up their sleeves to convince the end users of the need to confuse their visitors/customers with another extension, taking into account that:
a. mobile-friendly websites have been around for a long time already, using established gTLDs/ccTLDs
b. mobile devices such as the iphone/Opera mini devices can render non-optimized websites
c. let's not forget market share. It's all about the market. As Rick would put it, the market decides.
Right now the market for mobile is tiny. Yes I know, 'mobile gonna be huge', no doubt one day it will. When mobile catches up to the real Web- not the other way round.
My point being: mobile Internet has little weight today and I pretty much doubt any .mobi 'impetus' is going to make a big difference overnight (or even happen). I can only see the ext. stagnate into oblivion like .biz or .whatever...
Honestly it's going to take
serious industry 'backing' for mobi to work - much more than we have witnessed so far.
My verdict: another stillborn TLD. RIP .mobi :ghost: