Anthony Newman lends thought to the sad state of the mobile Internet and why the lack of tailored sites might not be entirely to blame.
The Internet's come a long way since it began. Initially, it was a largely information-central resource, with a limited amount of images and formatting; things were mostly text, and although it was ugly, at least it was simple.
Today, things are a lot different: pages are now designed to the max, filled with javascript, flash, hot-generated pages and shedloads of images. This caters very well to the broadband generation, and we rarely notice just how much data we're transferring in a simple browsing session.
That's not the case when we're on the move and using our mobile devices, however. Although our Pocket PCs, Palm OS devices and even Smartphones are capable of viewing 'proper' web pages rather than the spectacularly under-adopted WAP, these 'proper' pages have totally ignored the needs of less-capable devices.
Certain services are just perfectly suited, conceptually, to mobile use. Mapping services, online banking, news portals and so on prove doubly useful when on the road or in a hotel, and yet they tend to be the ones with the most frustrating designs. Inevitably, I'll be faced with some monstrous java application when trying to plan a route or find a train, or be told that my browser isn't compatible with my Internet banking - and would I mind downloading the latest version of Internet Explorer with JavaScript and cookies enabled? Even if my device could handle all these things, I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. The bandwidth, at today's GPRS prices, would bankrupt me, while viewing a bulky, poorly-designed graphical page on a small screen is never going to be fun.
Devices are becoming more powerful, with VGA screens echoing those found on the desktops of the internet's first popularity, and processors to match. Even our mobile Internet connections are as fast as those first generations of modems, and yet for all these advances the net has vastly outstripped them.
The solution isn't necessarily to create 'mobile' versions of sites, nor to regress to WAP for our mobile services. Instead, designers of pages should think a little more when doing their work generally. Does your page really need that Flash intro? Does it help to have the buttons glow when I mouse-over them? After all, I came here for information, not art. It's not just mobile devices that are affected by this pandemic: those disabled people who use text to speech packages to browse the web are frustrated by Flash and Java, while those with slower connections or PCs are hit too. A universal move back to the web's beginnings should be taken - albeit, with some lessons learned. Our devices are smaller and more elegant than those from the early nineties, and so should our web sites. Here's to the mobile revolution.
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