Missing the Little Picture

Browsing the Web on your cellphone can seem so hard that most people don't even try. But why should that be?

The Web by phone remains a strange, often unfriendly place for many people. Wireless carriers will sell you a device that can, theoretically, get to any page online -- although maybe not quickly or elegantly -- but then provide minimal help for using it.

Also, carriers' contracts impose arbitrary limits on what you can do. Listening to a Web radio station or viewing a YouTube clip? Bad. Hitting any of the preset Web bookmarks? Fine.

The mobile-phone industry has reached a point where it could actually offer devices that act, feel and function like computers. But despite recent advances such as speedier connections and some improved (if tiny) keyboards, the cellphone is still far from giving us unfettered access to the World Wide Web.

Some of the problems, like restrictive usage contracts, can't be fixed easily. But two can: Services and software can take a full-size page's data and present it in a phone-friendly manner, and sites can be written especially for the phone. These fixes, however, are largely do-it-yourself projects -- most of them don't have any wireless carrier's name on them.

Some free Web sites edit Web pages to make them legible on a phone's screen. The browsers on the most capable Internet-enabled phones do a little of this already, but these sites go much further. Go to one of them and type in the address of the page you want, and it will appear without complicated formatting and with its graphics miniaturized or erased entirely. Each link you follow will also be shrunk to fit accordingly.

I visited a handful of complex pages using conversion services by Google ( http://google.com/gwt/n), Skweezer ( http://skweezer.net) and Phonifier ( http://phonifier.com). All three shrank images down to thumbnail dimensions while preserving the relative sizes of headlines and regular text.

The major difference among them was usability: Google's service split the sites into smaller chunks than the other two, so I had to click "Next Page" links more often.

If you don't know the exact address of the site you want, Google ( http://google.com/m) and Ask ( http://mobile.ask.com) also provide mobile-search sites that incorporate the same conversion functions.

These services can't make every site usable, but they can easily minimize the pain of reading phone-unfriendly sites on the go. They're certainly better than waiting for your BlackBerry or Treo to choke down a page designed for a full-size screen.

The amazing thing is that no phone carrier seems to have thought to add one of these services to its default bookmarks, much less charge for the service. (Not that any of them should adopt that last idea! Phone contracts come with enough extra-cost options already, thanks.)

Another speedier option can be turning to software that you install on your phone to fetch Web data for you. It's similar to "widgets" and "gadgets" that Google Desktop, Mac OS X and Windows Vista offer as a quick way to access weather forecasts and sports scores on your desktop.