How does your favorite site look on your phone?
Thought this article was a good one from MicroPersuasion. It talks about an increasingly relevant issue (rising, of course, with iPhones all over the place now) - mobile sites and their compatibility and display on different mobile devices. As the article points out, most sites (at least the ones who think that there might actually be someone interested in accessing them from a phone) will detect (or “sniff”) what device you are browsing from and deliver the appropriate content. If you’re accessing from your PC, you get the full version with all the bells and whistles. But if you are accessing from your phone, you’ll get the slimmed down version - fewer graphics, more text, a simpler layout etc…
The challenge, of course, is that not all phone are created equal, particularly now as the iPhone and its neat little screen bring so much more screen space to the table. So while a site might want to re-direct you to its slimmed down text version, you might want to say, “Hey, I just paid $600 for this iPhone and I have the screen turned sideways and I’m connected via wi-fi so I want the regular site.” Steve Rubel pushes for user choice so that scenarios like this don’t annoy people.
Certainly this will continue to be something worth monitoring. Browsers on phones, connection speeds and screen size will allow for more compatibility, but it’s hard to imagine wanting the full site experience on your phone for all sites. Plus, given the nature of the “mobile” part of the phone experience, it’s reasonable to expect that most people will be looking to do things quickly, so mobile sites will probably be best suited to reflect this. For instance, if I’m checking on the status of my package through UPS, I probably don’t really care about how I could open a UPS corporate account at my office. I’ll handle that stuff at my office. As one of the commentors to the article notes, mobile devices, while they will continue to get better, will also continue to be designed for your hand(s). Inherently this will probably always lead to some necessary separation of mobile and desktop sites (not to mention all other applications).
Note -Screen shots above are from http://ready.mobi, which tests your site for how it might look on a mobile phone (keep in mind however, it is created by a company that makes its living by developing mobile sites for people…so let’s not be surprised if it skews on the negative side at all…)