Unintentionally Blank

I am a big fan of the mobile web, having just upgraded to Opera Mini 4 and been recently quoted in a Read/Write Web article on mobile web apps praising Google Maps for Mobile (yeah, that Phil is me, shame they didn’t send me any link love!).

I am actually a big user of both Google’s Gmail for Mobile as well as Maps for Mobile and was delighted to hear on the official Google blog that there has been not only an update to Maps for Mobile, but a new Google Mobile Blog. While I have subscribed to the mobile blog to keep up with updates to the two programs I mention above, as well as Android, the new version of Maps had me most excited.

GPS Without GPS

The newest feature of Maps, besides seemingly working quicker and with a nicer interface, is the My Location feature, a way to tell approximately where you are using mobile tower identification. It’s not quite GPS, but for anyone without it, it adds a whole lot more to your phone, without costing you anything extra. If you want to find out more about My Location, read the post and watch the video on the Google Mobile Blog.

The One Problem With My Location…

…is that my phone, a Sony Ericsson K800i, doesn’t support it. (It actually doesn’t specifically say on that page that my model doesn’t support it, but I pressed 0 a whole load of times and then checked the help in the program and it said “myl: N/A,” which really disappointed me.)

I should be getting a new phone soon, so hopefully I will be able to use this feature in the future, but until then, if anyone else uses My Location on Google Maps for Mobile, drop me a comment to tell me what I’m missing out on!

The Mobile Web Rocks!

Opera Mini lets me browse like I’m on a fully fledged desktop browser, Gmail gives me my mail, Maps gets me from place to place (I’ve lived in London a year and I still don’t have a clue). Do you use the mobile web at all? Any particular favourite programs or sites? I would love to hear of any experiences you have had with the mobile web, and if you haven’t tried it, have a go and let me know what you think.

Firstly I’m excited. Opera Mini 4 was released last week. I didn’t use the beta as I was happy with Opera Mini 3, but now version 4 is fully operational I have upgrade (though I only just found out… it seems that no-one cares about Opera Mini when there’s an iPhone being released). Secondly, I’m a little confused, Opera Mini 4, like the iPhone’s Safari, no longer supports handheld style sheets.

Quality Browsing On The Small Screen

Opera Mini 4 brings a whole load of new functionality to the mobile web, it’s available for most modern phones and renders full web pages (mostly) as the designer had intended. It allows for zooming in to pages to read the content and lines text up in screen width sized columns. It gives you a virtual mouse that you can scroll around the screen with and click links. JavaScript and AJAX support has also been improved, which is good news for users of modern, JavaScript heavy sites. This is a great step for the mobile web, users will now be even better served when surfing from their mobile and site owners have less to do to make their site compatible with mobile platforms. If Safari on iPhone hadn’t already done this, this would be big news, sadly, even though Opera Mini runs on most modern phones, excluding the iPhone of course, and can modernise the mobile web for many more users, it won’t be.

The Death Of The Handheld Style Sheet

The handheld style sheet is one that can be served to mobile devices using media definitions in the link, like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="screen.css" media=”screen” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”mobile.css” media=”handheld” />

The first declaration above loads a style sheet for screen use and the second for mobile, if the browser supports it.

Now you know what the handheld style sheet is, forget it. Today’s premier mobile browsers, Opera Mini 4 and Safari on iPhone don’t pay it any attention. The handheld style sheet is obsolete. Opera’s reason for this was:

[..] the main issue with handheld is that you are not giving the user much of a choice of what content is delivered to their phone. These days, phones are much more powerful than they used to be, and it is a bit insulting to have a web site see you are a mobile device, and then serve you a really dumbed down version of it’s content, even thought the device could quite easily support the full desktop version of the site. If you check out Opera Mobile 8.65, or WebKit on the iPhone, you’ll see a browser of comparable power to their desktop cousins.

This almost seems fair. Opera Mini, Safari on iPhone, Opera Mobile can all create an experience akin to using a desktop, with a bit of zooming in and out and panning around the screen it is all the same. Why give developers the ability to take that away with a handheld style sheet?

My opinion was that handheld style sheets aren’t for removing content or taking away from the experience of mobile browsing, I considered that they were useful for shrinking pages for the mobile platform, taking out unnecessary background images that would only take a long time to download over mobile networks or even organising the content in the right order. Providing a different experience for mobile users is more the realm of browser sniffing and redirection.

Handheld Reincarnation, Already!

Handheld style sheets are back already though, just under a different name. Opera Mini 4 and Safari on iPhone both support CSS3 media queries, allowing you to target styles to screen sizes. In my opinion this invalidates Opera’s arguments for dropping handheld support, since the same effects could be performed through media queries. However, these media queries could be used to perform styling for the mobile devices that I mention above too, so all is not lost, unless you think life for developers could be as hellish as Christian Montoya’s prediction

Conclusion

It looks like handheld style sheets are gone, and media queries and CSS3 are the future. In time, and as support grows for these media queries, we may find use for them in a more general context, shuffling dynamically between 1, 2 or 3 column layouts based on browser size comes to mind, with mobile browsers likely to get the 1 column version.

More importantly, mobile browsing has taken another step forward. If you like to surf on your mobile and you don’t already have Opera Mini, go and get it.

First Yahoo released their oneSearch, now Google have improved their mobile search. The mobile web is growing and the big search engines are pinpointing how we like to search and use our mobile devices. Now they will look to localise results and return information within the search page rather than make us click through. Yahoo will return results in your area for searches for things like movies and food and will return local news, weather and traffic reports if you type in a city. Google too promises to make an informed decision over whether you want web, local or image searches based on what you input.

When Read/Write Web broke the story on oneSearch, they had me sold. The next time I was going to use my mobile to look something up, I was going to go straight for Yahoo as opposed to my standard use of Google. Now it has all changed and I have a decision to make again. I will be trying out both Google’s new mobile search and Yahoo’s oneSearch to find out which suits me best. I need to know who provides the best data, which search is quicker, who’s search is the most accurate in my area and ultimately which search answers my questions the best. I’ll post my results when I’ve decided.

In the meantime, what mobile search engine do you prefer? Do you tend to stick to your favourite desk top search or do you shop around? Do you even use the mobile web? Let me know your thoughts on the potential competition here.