Smart phones, such as the iPhone, are set to change the way mobile browsing works.

Internet Access

WiFi access on mobile devices like the iPhone will dramatically reduce the cost and improve the speed of mobile web browsing. In the past, when only mobile dialup internet access was available, it was inevitably very expensive, costing at least the standard local mobile phone rate.

Alternatives, such as paying for data transfer rather than time spent online, were only cost-effective for very low usage applications such as instant messaging and plaintext email. The web browsing functionality of new mobile devices requires fast, cheap internet access, and WiFi is certainly the best answer in that regard.

Touch-Screen Technology

The iPhone's move away from stylus-based screen interaction is a huge step forward. Using a stylus means using two hands to operate the phone, which is problematic when on the move – it's virtually impossible to type a text message with a stylus while walking, but a touch-screen gives the user the option of holding the phone and typing with the thumb of the same hand.

Styluses are also easy to lose, and add an extra few seconds every time you want to use the device, as the stylus has to be removed from the PDA device and positioned in the hand. These extra few seconds may not sound like much, but they can be very frustrating for people used to the instant accessibility of a mobile phone.

Better Web Browsers

The iPhone has a full web browser – Apple's Safari – instead of a version which can only view sites specially made for mobile devices, or that can't cope with messy html that isn't standards-compliant (sadly, there's still a lot of that going around).

Better web browsing on mobile devices, and especially on mobile phones, is likely to widen the scope of the sorts of websites that can be designed for mobile users.

Horizontal Displays

Coupled with the full Safari web browser is the iPhone's ability to switch between portrait and landscape displays. Most mobile devices, being vertically orientated, have three options in the way they display most web pages, which tend to be designed with a landscape monitor in mind:

- In an effort to retain a page-width display, the text is reduced in size until it is so small that it's illegible.

- The page is legible, but the visitor must scroll sideways as well as up and down to read everything on it.

- The mobile device's browser forces the web page to squeeze into a vertical column, which almost certainly wasn't the arrangement the designer was envisioning.

The iPhone solves this problem by simply allowing the user to view the page horizontally. The text can be kept at a reasonable size without horizontal scrolling, but the user is also able to zoom in and drag around the page intuitively, by sweeping a finger across the screen (rather than fiddling about with scrollbars).

Other Improvements

- Windows Mobile is by far the most common mobile operating system, and in terms of performance, it's terrible: it's extremely slow, and freezes and crashes with remarkable regularity. Apple's iPhone OS is far more reliable.

- The email client included with the iPhone is of a high quality, with many powerful features.

- The iPhone's features can potentially be added to and changed via software updates, because it doesn't have a physical keyboard or many hardware buttons at all – everything is on-screen. This makes the iPhone seem very adaptable for future use.

By Helena Henderson

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