Who You Calling A Jesse?

Over the past week and a bit I have been using a Blackberry Pearl for web and email. My main reason for trying this out was to get a better idea of what the ‘web experience’ is like on the small screen. If you want a review of the Pearl there are a few of themaround and all agree the device is pretty good. I am just going to talk about my web browsing experience with the Pearl.

Once I got use to the keyboard, installed some software like the gmail client and Google maps, I started to have a lot of fun with it. The Pearl comes with RIM’s own new version Blackberry browser that supports HTML and some hand-held CSS. It seems to allow for some javascript and cookies which is handy for sites that have authentication based on that. Like any browser for mobile phones it scales images oddly. Overall the browser works ok but the poor hand-held CSS support makes most websites a pain to use and it can be hard for CSS/HTML developers to design for them unless they have a mobile version that changes the html.

Where it gets interesting is with some of the push services that you can build for the browser. The Weather Network has my favourite so far—it simply just gives me the 5 day forecast. But it does it in a really nicely designed way for the small screen (really should have a screen shot). I think this feature is cool but it appears to require a Blackberry Enterprise Server to deliver it and… which isn’t good for most web folks but if you are in a Blackberry shop, it is a really cool option for delivering content to your co-workers.

I installed Opera Mini 3.0 on the Pearl as well. This browser has some interesting features like RSS support and good hand-held CSS support. It does make it possible for sites that support CSS/HTML to easily modify its design for the browser with a content folding technique that offers help to the user.

Because Opera Mini can run just about any phone made after 2001 it might be the hand-held browser to develop for.

Overall though the browsing experience isn’t very good which isn’t the fault of the Pearl at all. In fact its better than I have seen on a Windows Mobile environment, it is just that the bar is set pretty low. But what are you trying to do with device? For news, updates, and messages the Pearl (as with most modern mobile devices) is just amazing in a purely text environment. However, when developing for users of devices like these there are a number of challenges I think but the biggest is figuring how mobile device users interact with your content as it can be very different across devices.

My approach at the moment is to take the lead from Flickr and give mobile devices the basic content of the site and some functionality. In reality people will likely not be filling out large forms on the things so keeping any forms to no more than two screens worth is probably not a bad idea either. I am working on a mobile device friendly home page and version of UW Events… I will let you know when there is something to look at.

One thing for sure: Standards friendly code will help you, so might things like Microformats, as it gives you a solid base to parse from. Like with any site that pulls content from other sources, you may want to create a PHP script on an otherwise static site that will create a mobile friendly version on the fly. I should have an example of that soon