• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 15, 2006

After a long stretch of deserved ignominy, the mobile Web re-loaded this year in a genuinely viable form. I have been doing some handset browsing of my own in recent months to see if I can finally cozy up to the WAP experience. Until now the prospect of surfing for any vital information via my cellular handset was too excruciating to bear. I know I can get the weather, stock quotes, and movie times from a variety of mainstream mobile Web sites. But first there's the tedium of navigating the terrible deck in order to traverse the inept mobile browser in order to load... and load... and load... the poorly designed Web site. Usually, I opt for ignorance.

A few things are starting to change that experience, key press by key press. First, the EV-DO data networks from Sprint and Verizon are accessible from most civilized regions now, and that alone eases the overall pain of mobile browsing. Verizon's built-in browser remains a pain to use and pretty much dissuades you from venturing out to the open Web. Sprint's network is considerably snappier in my experience, and the open garden approach lets me download third-party mobile browsers like the superb Opera Mini 2.0.

The mainstream Opera Web browser (now in version 9) never peeled more than a nano-slice of market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer despite its many superior features, but the company is taking aim at portability now and apparently courting the worldwide carrier and mobile device market. Opera has become the browser for Nintendo's Wi-Fi-capable DS handheld game console, for instance. Opera leads with its rendering engine, which can re-format most full-sized Webs sites into a usable mobile format. This is a nice trick but ultimately unsatisfying. The real value of Opera 2.0, and the reason it helps me warm up to WAP, is that it just has a sensible interface for mobile, and it is fast. Opera Mini is all about navigation: clear and present bookmarks and browser history, a smart use of on-board memory that lets you move backward and forward without reloading pages. Opera Mini 2.0 makes the carriers' built-in browsers seem as if they were designed to discourage mobile Web use.

Google is also quietly rolling out innovations that make a WAPster's life easier. It now has in beta (what isn't in beta over there, anyway?) a personalized mobile home page. Now you can maintain two Google home pages for your account: one for a standard Web browser and one for a WAP browser. The resulting page is imperfect, but less so than previous attempts. This online customization page lets you drag and drop news feeds and other widgets onto a mock-up of a phone screen, so you can get a sense of what the configuration will look like. The mobile home page still wastes too much real estate on title bars for each of the newsfeeds, but when bookmarked, it essentially aggregates your news as effectively as anything else on a phone deck right now.

One attempt at mobile aggregation is MobilePlay, a network of branded media (USAToday, Wired, PC World, NYtimes.com, etc.) that has been distributing on smart phones for a while. The handset is not the place anyone wants to browse information, but MobilePlay makes it possible. It collects its brands by content type and you drill into the major brands one at a time.

There is something to be said for having certain design disciplines enforced across different sites and brands on this handheld format. For instance, it is a joy to rifle through MobilePlay's collection, which not only keeps the headlines and sub-menus clear and big on screen, but keeps most information on a single screen. The design cleverly uses color and small logos to maintain branding in each providers' silo of information, but it looks as if MobilePlay has effectively poured its all into formats that just make more sense here than do endless scrolls. If the carriers had gotten it together enough to make their decks of aggregated media this good, then mobile Web browsing itself might not need its reputation restored to begin with.

I am not alone in nosing my way onto mobile browsing. According to M:Metrics' June mobile data usage benchmarks, about 20 million used phones to browse news and information in July, up 2.5 percent from the previous month. About 10 percent of cell phone owners browse regularly on their phones. Considering that in the U.K.--generally considered to be a much more evolved mobile data market--the penetration of regular mobile browsing is at 15 percent, then U.S. WAP use no longer seems trivial.

Third Screen Media, the mobile ad network, says its ad inventory has grown from 70 million to 100 million since Q1 this year. Louis Gump, director of mobile at the Weather Channel, told me recently that mobile hits to his servers during a recent hurricane watch were enough to make a substantial contribution to traffic. Clearly people are discovering the mobile Web--no thanks to the carriers who never, ever promote the capability. I suspect that much of this slow growth in user interest is a combination of curiosity and marketing from third-party publishers like Weather Channel and USA Today.

But what we really need is more cooperation from the carriers, because the experience of mobile browsing will always be unsatisfying, so long as it remains five or six clicks off of the main deck. If any medium was made for push technology and high degrees of personalization, this is it. I like being able to click into my Google home page from my mobile Web browser, but I would rather it were resident as a top-level choice on my deck. No, what I really want is my personalized portal page fed to the auxiliary LCD on the outside of my flip phone.

The mobile Web has evolved from an inhospitable no-man's land to a promising test bed to, now, a visible dream of genuinely portable information. I am just a few clicks away from having mobile data become habitual, from having it seem convenient enough so that I actually remember I can check a weather report on my phone. I am just a few interface tweaks away from headline checks becoming a reflex when waiting on a bank line. That really is what the carriers have been after all along, isn't it? New media platforms succeed with the public when they become effortless rituals (newspapers at breakfast, radio at drive time, Internet instead of working, TV in prime time). If the carriers can't get me to the Web any more efficiently than they have in the past, then what I really want is for them to get the hell out of our way.