Towards a more efficient browsing on mobile devices

May 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.