The World in Your Pocket

The smartphone market has been taking off for the last three years, with devices like the G1, iPhone and the up and coming PalmPre offering you a pocket computer, MP3 player and full Internet in your pocket when ever you want where ever you want. This has been a massive break through for the tech savvy people around the world. No more need for Internet cafes, slow dial up modems on phones or having to wait till you get home to find the latest news, read your emails, or in the case of students, check your facebook!

Recently we have been researching these markets, and in particular how the built in web browsers handle normal content. We did this as all our websites aim to be compliant with all the new web standards so that our sites are viewable to the highest possible audience. This means we want our sites to look amazing whether your viewing it on a 50″ plasma screen, or a 3″ iPhone screen.

Our research showed that most of the mobile browsers around are pretty good, with a lot of them holding up to all the standards that we would expect. The main difference in them is the way that they use navigation and how they handle flash. Most mobile browsers now are touch screen, which means that you navigate by tapping the screen, this is great, up until you come to a drop down menu or something that responds to a rollover behaviour.

Flash on the other hand just doesn’t work on most of the phones and products we tested, this doesn’t really effect us as we try to use as little flash as possible, mainly because it can be very distracting to the viewer of the site. There is nothing worse then going to a site and not knowing what to do to get the information you want because you have dancing pictures and flashing colours all over the place.

We tested all our sites on the G1 and iPhone and found the results where very good, the sites look great on both phones, and navigation is mainly easy. We edited some of our sites so that they view better on these screens, but it was a lot easier than we had expected. All our sites from now on are going to be tested and written to be compliant with most mobile platforms so that our clients can get the most users to their site possible.

That’s all for now.

J

PS. I wrote this on my iPhone while sat on the train!