There are many occasions when it’d be very handy to have an easily accessible mobile web browser. From wondering what’s on the telly and not being bothered wandering over to the computer or magazine to find out, to wondering which of the bewildering array of $20 bottles of white in the supermarket are worth purchasing for tonight’s dinner. Not to mention how handy it would be for the pub quiz night.
The device which proposes to meet this need is the mobile phone with a built in web browser. There are two problems with this. The first is that mobile data in Australia is horrendously expensive on most plans. The second is that web browsers on mobile phones all suck.
Neither of these problems are inevitable. There are a few decent mobile data plans, including offerings from Virgin ($10 for 300MB a month) and Three’s X-Series ($20 for 500MB a month), but they tend to be from the smaller players, and none of them are available with pre-paid plans. Most people’s mobile plans wont include deals for data, and when people try and use these services, they’ll pay through the nose for it.
As for mobile phone web browsers, admittedly the only ones I’ve tried are a generation or two old, but all the ones I’ve tried are crap. In particular, they don’t render modern, dynamic web pages well. Where they render them all all, you tend to spend a lot of your time scrolling sideways to see anything on the little screens. Doing anything like regular browsing is an exercise in frustration.
Some sites have mobile-specific pages, often rendered in much simpler HTML (or WAP) and designed to be read in a portrait orientation. Google even has a mobile site to search these pages, but it’s still a lot more painful than it should be.
There are a number of reasons I’d be interested in getting an iPhone (being an Apple fanboi, not having to lug around an iPod and a phone, instant geek cred, and so on), but one of the primary ones is that the web browsing implementation on the iPhone is supposed to rock. If, as rumoured, a 3G iPhone is due on June 9, I’m probably going to have to get one. A decent mobile web browser attached to a G3 data network will probably be a pretty compelling experience. If some competitive data plans come out to go with it, that’ll likely be a game changer.
Admittedly, with my current gaggle of gadgets, I’m almost there. My Nokia N810 Internet Tablet has a solid, quick, standards-compliant web browser (MicroB, a mobile port of the ubiquitous Firefox), a good email client, and even a not-too-crappy GPS. It’s not a mobile phone, but paired over bluetooth with my 3G mobile phone, it’s a pretty good mobile web browser.
The only problem with this is that means that I have to carry two devices (and the N810 is just a little too big to be back-pocket friendly), and click some buttons to make them talk to one another whenever I want to browse the net (the N810 also does Wifi, so at work or home I just use that). Of course, if I happen to be somewhere that does have GSM but doesn’t have 3G (such as all of Tasmania, apparently), the browser is so slow it’s almost unusable, but that would be a problem with any mobile device.
As far as devices go, the N810 is a lot more open than the iPhone, running as it does a Linux-based operating system, and not requiring the jumping through of any hoops for installing third-party software. Admittedly, from what I’ve seen, the (quasi-legal) iPhone software does look nicer — Linux developers often aim to make their software as ugly as possible.
One advantage of the ascendency of the iPhone is that that there is a new mobile web emerging, which isn’t as featureless as the old WAP sites, but isn’t as bloated as the full Web 2.0 experience. Most importantly, the iPhone has encouraged rich web sites designed for smaller screens. The iPhone version of Google Reader, for example, works wonderfully on the N810. It wont, however, work at all on the lame-arse web browser on my phone. So even in the absence of an iPhone, Apple if making the world a better place for alternative full-featured mobile browsers. Hopefully, this trend will result in increased adoption of full-featured browsers in other mobile phones, which would be very useful for those who aren’t interested in Apple’s phone, but still want the full benefit of the rich mobile web.
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