|
Browsing
the Web on your cellphone can seem so hard that most
people don’t even try. But why should that be?
The Web
by phone remains a strange, often unfriendly place for
many people. Wireless carriers will sell you a device
that can, theoretically, get to any page online—although
maybe not quickly or elegantly—but then provide minimal
help for using it.
Also,
carriers’ contracts impose arbitrary limits on what you
can do. Listening to a Web radio station or viewing a
YouTube clip? Bad. Hitting any of the preset Web
bookmarks? Fine.
The
mobile-phone industry has reached a point where it could
actually offer devices that act, feel and function like
computers. But despite recent advances such as speedier
connections and some improved (if tiny) keyboards, the
cellphone is still far from giving us unfettered access
to the World Wide Web.
Some of
the problems, like restrictive usage contracts, can’t be
fixed easily. But two can: Services and software can
take a full-size page’s data and present it in a
phone-friendly manner, and sites can be written
especially for the phone. These fixes, however, are
largely do-it-yourself projects—most of them don’t have
any wireless carrier’s name on them.
Some
free web sites edit web pages to make them legible on a
phone’s screen. The browsers on the most capable
Internet-enabled phones do a little of this already, but
these sites go much further. Go to one of them and type
in the address of the page you want, and it will appear
without complicated formatting and with its graphics
miniaturized or erased entirely. Each link you follow
will also be shrunk to fit accordingly.
I
visited a handful of complex pages using conversion
services by Google (google.com/gwt/n), Skweezer (skweezer.net)
and Phonifier (phonifier.com). All three shrank images
down to thumbnail dimensions while preserving the
relative sizes of headlines and regular text.
The
major difference among them was usability: Google’s
service split the sites into smaller chunks than the
other two, so I had to click “Next Page” links more
often.
If you
don’t know the exact address of the site you want,
Google (google.com/m) and Ask (mobile.ask.com) also
provide mobile-search sites that incorporate the same
conversion functions.
These
services can’t make every site usable, but they can
easily minimize the pain of reading phone-unfriendly
sites on the go. They’re certainly better than waiting
for your BlackBerry or Treo to choke down a page
designed for a full-size screen.
The
amazing thing is that no phone carrier seems to have
thought to add one of these services to its default
bookmarks, much less charge for the service. (Not that
any of them should adopt that last idea! Phone contracts
come with enough extra-cost options already, thanks.)
Another
speedier option can be turning to software that you
install on your phone to fetch Web data for you. It’s
similar to “widgets” and “gadgets” that Google Desktop,
Mac OS X and Windows Vista offer as a quick way to
access weather forecasts and sports scores on your
desktop.
Yahoo (go.yahoo.com)
and Microsoft (mobile.search.live.com) have downloadable
mobile-phone software available, but Google offers a
wider, more compatible assortment of these programs. Its
handheld version of Google Maps—available at google.com/gmm
for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Java-enabled
phones—should be essential for anybody who wants to,
say, leave the house.
Smaller
developers have also ventured into this category. Palm
Treo users, for instance, can use the free Directory
Assistant and Flight Status programs (search for both on
palmgear.com) to look up phone numbers and
flight-schedule info on the go.
Some
sites come designed specifically for the mobile phone,
and these have made huge advances. In fact, sometimes,
they wind up being more useful than their full-fledged
desktop versions.
Consider
the mobile editions of
Washington’s
Metro and Major League Baseball (MLB). At Metro’s page
(visit wmata.com/mobile on your phone), you see only the
four items you’d want to know about on the go: “Plan
Trip,” “Next Scheduled Departure,” “Next Train
Information” and, when applicable, “Service Alerts.”
Follow each of those links—all are numbered, so you only
need to hit the right number key instead of trying to
navigate by using buttons on the phone—and in a few,
quick-loading screens you’ll have the information you
need.
But if
you go to Metro’s regular site, you have to work harder
to find these data. Getting arrival times for the next
train to pull into a station, for example, requires
going through two screens’ worth of content first.
At MLB’s
mobile site (go to wap.mlb.com on your phone), you’ll
find a simple eight-item menu that puts the important
stuff—status, scores, standings, news and so on—a mere
press of a button away. But on baseball’s normal home
page, you have to pore over dozens of drop-down menus,
navigational bars and animated listings.
As an
added bonus, the discipline imposed by a phone’s small
screen and slow connections has done a wonderful thing
in these and other cases. It has forced Web designers to
focus on what users need, instead of concocting flashy
interfaces that look great in conference-room
demonstrations. |
