Today's populace is increasingly mobile. They are demanding desktop functionality from their cell phones. These platforms provide greater opportunities for people to access training especially for those who are busy and geographically dispersed. The proliferation of smartphones has put very capable pocketable computers in many hands. Blackberrys became the enterprise standard for mobile e-mail. The iPhone changed the game by creating a market for small, focused applications. Android phones are getting everybody on the internet all the time. Let us not forget Windows Mobile and Palm that created the first convergence devices called PDA's.

But, all of these different platforms make it difficult and expensive to write one application and distribute for all to use. They must be ported to different hardware, programming environments, and delivery silos. This paper will describe using web development to deliver rich applications to varying mobile platforms. The domain is synchronous training using the US-Nexus (a virtual world platform being used by a variety of federal organizations.) The approach is to allow mobile phone users to remotely take part in lectures, tutorials, and briefings with access to presentations and on-line activities in-sync with participants who are attending live or in a virtual world.

This paper describes the use of Web 2.0 techniques to deliver a very non-web mobile user experience. The discussion covers strategies for adapting to different screen sizes, designing for touch, server-side client session synchronization, and interoperability with non-web services (like messaging.) It also discusses the trade-offs for designing an effective mobile training experience focusing on a decision process for what features to implement and what to leave out.