Surfing the Internet with a mobile phone

This week's blog post will be about mobile phone browsing. Since today's technology is moving towards smaller and more portable devices, mobile phones have become a must. Apart from the basic phone capabilities, mobile phones have become a common way to surf the Internet.

Unfortunately due to processing power limits and screen sizes, some web sites are unusable with some mobile phones. To create a better surfing experience the Wireless Markup Language (WML) was created. The WAP protocol uses WML instead of the standard HTML to provide internet web pages for mobile phones. This provides pages that are more compatible and usable with mobile devices. Using WML is a good solution to implement a website for a mobile device, but this would require the creation and maintenance of another web page that is dedicated for mobile devices only. This could result in more expenses and more human resources would be required. Not all companies can support such expenses and this has become a problem.

The solutions would be to either create better web technologies that can suite both mobile phones and larger devices or create better devices. Fortunately nowadays mobile phones are getting better and better and the browsing experience has improved a lot. Screen sizes and resolution have also improved allowing for normal web sites to be fully compatible. Although devices with such power are still expensive, future development will provide cheaper and better devices. In my opinion there is no need for a separate mobile browsing technology. Mobile phones are moving towards dual core CPUs which will provide enough power to run power full browsers on the mobile device. Creating a separate technology for mobile phones creates inconvenience for web developers as they have to develop multiple versions of the same web page.

I think that if you have a good recent mobile device, you can surf the web with quite a good experience. Problems however occur more due to bad styling other than a bad technology. If a web developer designs a web site that is supposed to be used also on mobile devices, he should take into account the mobile resolutions are smaller than normal monitors. Therefore special care should be taken when styling such that the web site can be still usable on smaller screens. Nowadays screens are also getting better and this problem will be reduced in time.