Towards a more efficient browsing on mobile devices

Mayo 14, 2006

On one hand, web browsing using a mobile device can lead to having hard time, due to the inherent constraints imposed by the device itself — mainly physical constraints like reduced size.

Amongst this constraints are the following points:
* reduced size screen,
* reduced memory,
* reduced bandwith (when paying downloaded volume),
* limited navigation/scrolling facilities,
* limited user input facilities.

(Thanks to this article at “A List Apart” by Elika Etemad and Jorunn Danielsen Newth).

For that reasons i feel usefull to have a carefully selected list of fatfree-and-mobile-friendy web sites at hand. For example, in my case I use the following sites:
* Google Mobile,
* Gmail mobile,
* Google gateway to mobile friendly (I don’t know its official name)…

On the other hand, this mobile friendly bookmarks list will ideally fullfil the following requirements:
* be available from anywhere,
* be available from any browser (mobile or not),
* be short.

The first idea that comes to my mind to maintain that — reduced — list is to save it in my del.icio.us account and tag each entry using a special tag. In my case I’ll use “@mb” — for mobile bookmark.

The problem about del.icio.us is that, as far as I know, it doesn’t provide a mobile friendly version of itself.

Fortunately, Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) give us some tricks in its Del.icio.us Mobile article, to get a fatfree version of your del.icio.us pages.

In my case I choose to use the option 2 trick, reducing entries tagged with my special “mobile bookmark” tag: http://del.icio.us/html/adumont/@mb/?tags=no&rssbutton=no.

How can this be finally usefull: use that link (customized to your needs) as your favorite browser homepage will hopefully help improving your web browsing experience using mobile device.


Fatfree Gmail

Mayo 13, 2006

Every now and then I feel like if Gmail where been slower and slower, with continuous script timeout alerts (Firefox).

If the only thing that you want if reading your Gmail Inbox, I’ve found recently that Gmail has a mobile (read a lightweight UI) version available at: https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ (note the trailing /x/).

It fatfree: no slow Ajax scripts. Of course no all the options seem available, but it’s really fast!

By the way, the main Google search engine is also available in a lightweight version at http://www.google.com/pda.