By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, February 8, 2007

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.

Yahoo ( http://go.yahoo.com) and Microsoft ( http://mobile.search.live.com) have downloadable mobile-phone software available, but Google offers a wider, more compatible assortment of these programs. Its handheld version of Google Maps -- available at http://google.com/gmm for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Java-enabled phones -- should be essential for anybody who wants to, say, leave the house.

Smaller developers have also ventured into this category. Palm Treo users, for instance, can use the free Directory Assistant and Flight Status programs (search for both on http://palmgear.com) to look up phone numbers and flight-schedule info on the go.

Some sites come designed specifically for the mobile phone, and these have made huge advances. In fact, sometimes, they wind up being more useful than their full-fledged desktop versions.

Consider the mobile editions of Washington's Metro and Major League Baseball. At Metro's page (visit http://wmata.com/mobile on your phone), you see only the four items you'd want to know about on the go: "Plan Trip," "Next Scheduled Departure," "Next Train Information" and, when applicable, "Service Alerts." Follow each of those links -- all are numbered, so you only need to hit the right number key instead of trying to navigate by using buttons on the phone -- and in a few, quick-loading screens you'll have the information you need.

But if you go to Metro's regular site, you have to work harder to find these data. Getting arrival times for the next train to pull into a station, for example, requires going through two screens' worth of content first.

At MLB's mobile site (go to http://wap.mlb.com on your phone), you'll find a simple eight-item menu that puts the important stuff -- status, scores, standings, news and so on -- a mere press of a button away. But on baseball's normal home page, you have to pore over dozens of drop-down menus, navigational bars and animated listings.

As an added bonus, the discipline imposed by a phone's small screen and slow connections has done a wonderful thing in these and other cases. It has forced Web designers to focus on what users need, instead of concocting flashy interfaces that look great in conference-room demonstrations.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.