Mobile browsing proxy services. Are they needed today?

Greetings,

I work for a large Online E-Commerce company. I have recently taken over the mobile strategy for Enterprise customers. I am frequently solicited by various companies that have mobile web products. One of these products is a proxy service that routes mobile browsers to site that has been "Cleaned" of code that is unfriendly to mobile devices.

On one hand this is a great service if you need to target a large group of users who might be on flip phones or still run an os like symbian. On the other hand the service creates these generic looking mobile sites that look horrible on new smart devices. In my research I have also found out that the services, which basically just sc开发者_如何转开发rape your website, often contain errors and missing pages.

My company has spent a good deal of time making sure that our UI is friendly to smaller devices. The browsers on the phones are always getting better as well. Most of the devices now shipping have support for flash, multiple media types, do smart zoom very well etc.

In the world of phones today (Particularly in the US / Canada) are you cutting out a huge group of "mobile shoppers" if your site cant be browsed by older phones?

IMHO anyone who wants to use their phone for online shopping would be knowledgeable enough to buy a better phone.

Besides, (don't know about US but) in the EU most of the contracts are 12-18 months so many people gets new phone every 12-18 month