During the two weeks I’ve been away on vacation, I was able to experience for the first time the developments made on the Mobile Web. I enjoyed internet access on my Nokia N73 given by my mobile operator until September. Compared to other mobile phones, it has a somewhat large screen. I didn’t do an extensive study (I was trying to enjoy the vacations…). I mainly checked my GMail account, Google Reader (I moved away from Flock to keep my feed reading portable) and my Twitter account.

Nokia browser vs Opera Mini

By whim at Flickr.

The phone came with the Nokia web browser (WebKit based). While it does a good job rendering the pages and has a nice navigation system, it even includes a tiny cursor, I installed the Opera Mini browser. It does a better job keeping the pages simpler for mobile reading. For example, on my blog, which doesn’t have any mobile optimization, it adjusts all text and layout to the size of the screen, rendering low resolution versions of images and applying CSS partially (ignoring sizes, but keeping styles). On the other side, Nokia browser renders the page faithfully, with every element on it’s place, only adjusting also the text to the width of the phone screen. Both browsers make the reading of content painless, but Opera Mini saves 50 KB (+/-20 KB against +/-70 KB) just in this blog. Considering mobile internet access is still very expensive, and 3G networks don’t have the best reach on places like beaches, the Opera browser has the best advantages.

However, Opera Mini isn’t bullet proof. I stumbled upon websites that did an heavier use on JavaScript functionalities and some just became unusable, while on the built-in browser all seemed fine. And sometimes ignoring a website layout has some bad effects. On more bloated sites, I had to scroll through endless menus, bars and ads before reaching the real content.

Mobile Website Versions

The problems I mentioned above disappear when we enter a website’s mobile version. Luckily Gmail, Google Reader and Twitter all had their own mobile versions, which improves much of the experience. These versions are usually very straightforward to the most usual actions: no configuration or lots of options. Unfortunately there aren’t that much mobile versions out there yet, although it’s getting a little better, and sometimes they are really well hidden inside the main website.

There’s some discussion around whether we should develop mobile versions or wait until mobile internet access gets cheaper and broader and fully functional browsers get to our hands. The second options seems the most easy for web developers and that way users would be able to experience the whole web experience (like iPhone claims). But that’s not really the Mobile Web. Only smart phones and PDAs are able to offer that kind of browsers. And specially, when we’re outdoors, we simply don’t want the same things like when we’re at home surfing. We want our content quickly and to perform just the basic actions.

Future

So, while mobile browsers technology keeps improving with the objective of turning every page mobile-friendly, developers must also help using standards, clean (X)HTML, javascript-free versions and when your service really is useful anywhere, releasing it’s own mobile version.

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