Sunday, July 27, 2008

Internet Browsing in my centro

Let's be honest, the only mobile device that offers a great mobile internet experience is the iPhone and to a lesser degree the iPod touch. Safari is a great browser in all its incarnations (Mac, Windows and Mobile) raising the bar for all other devices.

Now I can see a small ray of hope for Windows Mobile (Opera Mobile) and for the next generation of smartphones using Linux in its different incarnations (Nova, Android, etc) but what can we do faithful users of a PalmOS (Garnet) device?

A lot I can say.

First, the time were we just "browse" is over, with our current information overload, it is more important than ever to get what we want/need to read without distracting information and to our rescue we have QuickNews. This incredible piece of sofware is a news reader or rss reader or feed reader, depending on the buzz word of the day, it basically allows you to get only the content that you need by subscribing to RSS Feeds, nowdays almost every website offers this neat tool. With Quicknews you will avoid jump from website to website to check the latest news, weather, industry specific articles, etc. All the information will be in your palm.

Now, an RSS Feed is basically the latest content of the website in text format and most web sites include the full article but some don't, for this you will need to actually go the web site, but what to do when the web site don't offer a mobile version? it can be really annoying to wait for pages whose content is so rich (images, video, etc) that takes forever to load even in the mobile fastest networks. Then what to do?

The solution is simply to use a compressor, compressors are web sites that "compress" the websites to be more useful in a mobile browser (Blazer, Xiino), QuickNews works well with 3: Google, MobileLeap and Skeezer.

OK, after this your browsing experience should be more pleasant but still not perfect, so here are some extra tips:

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal detect when you are using Blazer and they redirect you to the mobile version of the web site. It works for everything except for the NYT blogs.

I am working in a utility which will give you more choice between compressors, the printer friendly version of a web page (for some websites) or the mobile web site directly. I will make it public next week.