Hands on: Going mobile

Mobile web access has come a long way since the days of Wap, when over-optimistic phone networks put thousands off with a dismal rendering of a few sites. Modern handsets such as the Apple iPhone make a pretty good stab at rendering standard web pages, as do smartphones with Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems.

But, as anyone who has used them will know, they can often be quite frustrating, especially when sites use scripts and plug-ins for some of their essential content. And I’m sure I’m not the only Hands On reader who has experienced crashes and other glitches that mean having to restart your mobile browser ­ or even the phone itself ­ and then navigate back to where you were.

All in all, while the annoyances of Wap may be long gone, and with it the need to come up with a whole new way of coding pages just for mobiles, only the naive would say that the mobile internet is anywhere near as simple and straightforward to use as on the desktop.

We could hope for everyone to have devices with big screens and accurate rendering, something that the iPhone manages quite well, or suggest that for real browsing you need a slightly bigger screen, such as Nokia’s internet tablets or even a netbook.

But, in the meantime, what can you do if people want to use your website on a mobile? This month, I’m going to look at some of the options.

Go with RSS
I’ve talked before about the Guardian’s website and the annoyance of having adverts even in the ‘ad-free’ version, which can result in quite a lot of data being downloaded unless you switch off all images.

But they do deserve some praise for a recent change to their RSS feeds, which has the side effect of making more of their content available on some mobile devices.

The latest update to its feeds has added ­ alongside neat features such as geotagging, which I’ll look at in another column, ­ the full text of most of its articles. So if your mobile browser supports RSS feeds, such as the one built in to many Symbian phones, then you can simply grab the information you want that way, without having to visit the site and fetch all the associated graphics, CSS and so on.

It means you can also set your phone to update regularly and always have the latest stories to read.
If your site is updated regularly and you can put the full text of articles into the feed, this is one way of making it accessible ­ but only, of course, to people who have RSS readers on their mobile phones.

Already went
The official way that the Guardian suggests its users access the site from mobiles is through its Avant Go channel. Avant Go (www.avantgo.com) was a great little service back in the heyday of the Palm Pilot, syncing PDA-friendly versions of web pages automatically for you.