S60 Open to new features

February 22, 2006 More web sites to become mobile-friendly Posted by Phil Schwarzmann at 03:30 PM | Categories: Commentary Here's a belated prediction for 2006: More web sites become mobile-friendly. Mobile browsers are rapidly improving and screen sizes are constantly getting bigger. But at the same time, typical websites are becoming more complex, more CPU-intensive, bigger in filesize, and like my waist size since I turned 21, minimal resolutions keep getting wider.

It's an endless race of cat and mouse - people keep believing that mobile browsers will catch-up to fullsize browsers and I just don't see that ever happening. Surfing just about anywebsite on your smartphone device isn't that bad - but isn't always that great either. Large images and unecessary components can be time-consuming to load and pricey as well. Nowadays, just about everything comes served on a RSS feed but starring at gobs of pure text for more than five minutes makes me depressed.

So I think 2006 is the year we'll see more mobile-specific sub-sites of all your favorites, even less popular sites like blogs, CMS's, and forums. All the latest online platforms have easy-to-install themes, just snap on a new theme to your blog or edit a CSS file and your site instantly becomes mobile-friendly. But first users are going to need to demand this, with less expensive onlines and more powerful phones, I think 2006 is the year this will happen.

S60.com has already done something similar, browse to www.s60.com on your mobile and it'll direct you to the mobile-friendly www.s60.com/mobile site - Winksite is another easy and quick way to make your existing site mobile friendly. Or with a little text-editing skills, you can manually make your own site a friend of the mobile phone, here are some tutorials here, here, and here.

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Comments

I am really waiting for typepad and blogger to put this into the platform so that every blog automatically gets a mobile version as well. This way I could use the links generated by my mobile RSS reader on my 6680 to lead me to mobile optimized pages. Winksite and other things do not help here as the URL is different from the "PC-size" blog version.

Posted by: Martin | February 22, 2006 04:13 PM

Ahhhh... should have followed your links before posting. Apparently we're hanging out in the same places. Dave

Posted by: David Harper | February 23, 2006 04:26 AM

Martin, I like that idea. Why don't you pitch that to Loïc (http://www.loiclemeur.com/) and whoever-is-behind-blogger?

Most probably, they have already thought/implemented it, but I think it doesn't hurt making sure...

Posted by: Tommi Vilkamo | February 23, 2006 12:57 PM

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