I don’t mean “internets” in the sense of the George Bush’s “I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, Internets”. I’m thinking that while there is only one internet, there really are several separate unequal mobile webs. The inequality comes from the huge variation in capabilities of mobile phone browsers. I like to divide mobile browsers into 5 broad categories; full web, big page, advanced embedded, basic embedded and wml-only. At the top are the mobile “full web” browsers like the … Continue reading →

Dropdown lists are very widely used on web forms. Travel sites often have month and date pickers implemented as dropdown lists using <select> and <option> tags. It works pretty well on a desktop browser. Be careful when transferring this design pattern to the mobile web, though. <select>s with too many <option>s can break a mobile page. I’m not just talking about usability either, I mean broken as in completely non-functional. Recently, I tried to use the mobile site of a … Continue reading →

I like Skweezer.net‘s mobile transcoder. It’s one of the best ways to make desktop websites into something usable on a phone and it works with just about every html-capable phone on the planet. Last week Skweezer issued a press release announcing a tweak they made to the service. The tweak is that Skweezer rolled back a change they made a month and a half ago. Instead of identifying itself through it’s User Agent header as Internet Explorer, Skweezer had tried … Continue reading →

Mobile browsers designed to display any web page, often called “Full-Web” mobile browsers, are starting to drive a significant amount of traffic to both mobile and non-mobile sites. Smartphones usually have a full-web browser like Opera Mobile, Netfront, Palm Blazer, Mobile Internet Explorer or the Nokia Mini Map Browser. Smartphones sales have broken into double digits and it’s reasonable to expect Smartphone users to use the Web much more than those with more humble devices. Opera Mini makes a big … Continue reading →