For those that remember internet in the late 1990s, you remember your dialup being slow, there was no such thing as tabbed browsing, web sites were clunky/cumbersome and difficult to navigate, low screen resolutions of the time meant lots and lots of scrolling, and well, you get the idea.
Thankfully we don’t have to deal with that anymore, right?
Wrong.
A smartphone’s browser interface more or less acts the same way our desktop PCs did in the late ’90s.
While it’s true that 3G connectivity – when it works – is faster than dialup was, you’re still stuck waiting for things to load. And when it does load, the browsers that smartphones have are watered down to the point where many "regular" web sites are simply unusable on a mobile device.
Developers are making continual improvements to make smartphones more usable, but the overall browsing experience hearkens back to a day when internet browsing was a chore at best.
Using the iPhone as an example, it only has a 480×320 screen resolution. That’s lower than VGA spec which is 640×480. Anybody who uses an iPhone or like mobile device knows full well that the browser has "creative" ways of getting around a resolution so low. And you have to use those creative ways (such as zoom and pan in/out) else you can’t browse with it regularly at all.
For you older ladies and gentlemen that think the kids today don’t know what it was like to browse the internet Web 1.0 style, they do because current browser technology and network speed on a smartphone is pretty darn close to the mark of what a browsing experience was like in the late 1990s.
How long will it take smartphones to graduate to a desktop PC’s level of web browsing?
Indeterminate. But there are three things that will kick-start mobile browsing forward exponentially.
The first is the network itself. 3G is just too darned slow. Better than EDGE, yes, but still slow. The next-gen network for whatever it will be called should fix that ill in short order.
The second is the hardware, namely the processor. Newer chips will be introduced within the next five years that run faster without adding any additional heat. (It’s always the heat that’s the big deal by the way.)
The third is the software, but that’s being attended to right now. All the major players have good solid OSes for their respective platforms. Better mobile browsers like Opera Mobile (which does do tabs very well by the way) means a better mobile browsing experience.
A problem all software developers for smartphones face is having to work around – meaning not with – the aforementioned points above. It seriously curtails development when your biggest roadblocks are the processing speed of a smartphone and the network in which it connects to. Shades of how software development used to be for PCs? Oh, yes. Even the programmers have to deal with Web 1.0 era style crapola.
I want to make clear that I’m not saying smartphones are unsuable. They obviously have their place in the modern tech world, and tons of people use them on a daily basis. However you have to admit, browsing on one is very reminiscent of the usability problems we had years ago.
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