A Lack Of “Designed For Mobile” Web Sites
This is another thing that irritates the hell out of me. I don’t care whether you use an iPhone, a Pre, a BlackBerry, or a Windows Mobile phone. These small little devices have (relatively) small little screens. The iPhone/iPod Touch does a respectable job with “desktop” web sites on such a small LCD, but sites like Slashdot and Digg are still awfully unbearably slow on my iTouch. And there’s no reason for it. Major sites, or any site wanting to incur serious traffic from mobile devices, should spend the time and effort to create a site that works well on a 480x320/320x240 screen. ESPN does this very well, as does CNN. Digg’s mobile site is OK, but certainly not great.
A mobile web browser that can render a full-sized page “well enough” is a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, made worse by the AJAX and Flash garbage that can bring even a desktop computer to its knees. But it seems that these very mobile web browsers that have made this situation worse, in that web developers no longer dedicate time developing mobile-oriented sites. The likes of Mobile Safari and the Pre’s web browser are certainly not universally evil, but it seems to me it’s a case of one-step forward, one-step backward for accessing the web on mobile gadgets as a whole.
