Open Thread: Have You Started Mobile Browsing?
Mobile phones are not ideal for surfing the web and yet they have their advantages. They’re portable and cheap plus most of us carry them with us all the time. Might we be looking towards a world where lightweight devices with small screens provide our default connection to the web?
A study commissioned by T-Mobile found that mobile phones provide employees with the ability to connect to the world outside their cubicle even when management restricts access to social networking, web-based email, and other non-work-related websites. Here’s where a mobile phone’s portability comes in most handy — 15% of those surveyed even confessed to mobile browsing in the bathroom.
In response to the T-Mobile study, Jeremy Wagstaff suggests that mobile browsing is the future:
History will find it weird, not that we connect to the Web on the john with a device once designed to make phone calls, but that for 15 years we had to do that via a big hunk of metal, plastic and wires sitting in the middle of what used to be a big open space called a desk.
Do you surf the web on your mobile phone? What sites do you visit from your tiny screen? Do you foresee a day when you will do most of your surfing on a phone rather than a PC?
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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I surf on my phone everyday. I use it to read my rss feeds when I’m not at my computer. Most of the time I’m browsing wap.howardforums.com, m.wordpress.com, m.flickr.com, m.twitter.com, mobile.starbucks.com, and engadget.com which when using a mobile browser Engadget automatically formats the page for a phone screen.
I regularly check my gmail and my google calendar on my mobile phone, and both work great. I highly recommend google calendar since it’s new mobile interface is very easy and quick to use.
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I use my phone for the local water temp and surf report (surfline.com), accessing my to do list on the web (m.rememberthemilk.com), google reader for RSS feeds (www.google.com/reader/m/view) and checking my netflix queue (web.netflix.com).
I used to use Newsgator for my Treo, then bought a Nokia N*80 with the fancy web browser in it. I love the way it works, and it makes reading websites on the go much better. Still, my biggest qualm is connection speeds. Slow loading feeds etc. can make the experience a pain sometimes.
Quite a bit actually. Heavy use of my feed reader (Google reader). Also use Twitter, Facebook, Newsvine, and Google calendar.
I do e-mail (hotmail and gmail), gcalendar, and occasional Cingular provided news. This all started in class (college), when I was bored.
I read the New York Times on my phone almost every morning. Their last redesign has made the site a lot easier to browse. And of course, gmail.
I only really use it to check Nextbus.com in SF and once in a blue moon to check cellartracker.com
Same as pretty much everyone else- Google, with my IGoogle (yuck) page set up as my mobile home page. The new google calendar is pretty cool, but I still think the mobile version of the reader needs more work. Mowser (mowser.com) is good for formatting any page into a mobile-friendly version, and http://wikipedia.7val.com/ provides a good mobile interface to wikipedia.
Funny this thread should appear now. I just got a new phone last week. A few years ago I tried mobile browsing and pretty much gave up on it, except for checking BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/index.shtml) and slashdot (http://slashdot.org/palm/) on the train. It was too much of a chore and there was really nothing out there.
Now, in addition to Google Mail, Calendar and Reader, I’ve discovered that flickr (http://m.flickr.com/) and facebook (http://m.facebook.com/) have excellent mobile sites, though I wish I could favorite photos from the flickr interface. Upcoming (http://m.upcoming.yahoo.com/) has also introduced a mobile site recently, but I haven’t used it yet. It’s pretty safe to say that I’m addicted!