Imagining Mobile Browsing
I was wondering what it might be like to browse the internet on a screen the size of the iPad’s. Yes, this is what my life has been reduced to. I checked out the dimensions of the iPad (about 7.5″ x 9.5″) and cut a piece of paper that size. I drew in the bezel and voila!, I had a paper iPad. Then, I held it up to my laptop screen and shrunk my browser to fit. Basically, that involved making the browser window a little less wide. Finally, I went to the developer window of Safari and selected Mobile Safari for the iPod touch as my User Agent. Okay, it’s not a perfect setup, but this is as close as I’m going to get for now.
Browsing this way worked just fine. As you may or may not know, websites are able to tell what browser you are using. When they detect that you are using a mobile browser, some websites automatically redirect you to a mobile version of their page. YouTube does this, so do CNN and Facebook. In several cases, I found the stripped down versions of the website to be better than their fancy-pants full-powered versions. While I do believe that the iPad will be able to handle the full versions, it’s nice to see that website developers have put in special attention to delivering web content that will work best for users.
The screen size seems perfectly suited for displaying most websites, and in my efforts at discovery, I gave the New York Times “Times Skimmer” a try. Essentially it displays articles in an appealing format. When you click on an article, it pops up within the browser window. You can easily click back to look at articles again. It sure beats the back and forth you would experience looking at news on their regular website. And it seems designed with small screens in mind!
Who knows how it will be to actually use the internet on a mobile internet device, but based on my brief test, it seems pretty friendly. Mobile versions of websites combined with a nice large screen would seem to equal flawless performance. Now, off to use my pretend paper touch screen and look like the saddest Apple fanboy ever.
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