The need for always available email had me recently equipping up with a Motorola Q Windows Mobile 5-based smartphone. With Exchange Direct Push email capabilities (where the device opens an idled HTTP connection, being notified expediently when new messages are available with the minimum of data throughput), it has served the core purpose admirably, and is a wonderfully handy little device.

The addition of wireless, always-available communications has made it infinitely more useful than prior abandoned outings with PDAs.

Ultimately it's a Blackberry(TM) competitor. While I'm only 60km from RIM headquarters, for me this was a better device than the more commonly chosen option. In this case the technology infrastructure didn't require a third-party to unnecessarily act as an middleman of messages.

I don't only use it for email, though. Every now and then the device serves secondary duty as a web browsing tool: The landscape QVGA screen isn't exactly copious, but it's enough for basic browsing for some sites, catching up on tech news and happenings in situations where a traditional network isn't available, and I don't want to open up a laptop.

This blog looks great on it. The "content" column perfectly filling the screen by luck rather than intent. The homepage requires an excessive 229KB of transfers, but at least most of those bytes are filled with content text. Nonetheless, I think I'm going to change the settings to show fewer days of history on the main page.

Despite the grand pronouncements by the telcos about their high speed, next generation networks, the speed is often closer to dial-up, and where throughput is high the latency is often poor, making pages with dozens of elements a time consuming affair. Even with a speedy connection, many telcos have low throughput limits with exorbitant fees beyond that.

Loading a page like Joel's discussion page -- a very basic text discussion site -- remarkably pegs in at 280KB or so of transfers (grab a copy of the extraordinary Firebug add-in for Firefox and look at the Net tab. It is often eye opening), overwhelmingly for scripts that have no use on the discussion site.

Sure, caching helps for subsequent requests, but on small devices there's often little room set aside to cache 100s of KBs of irrelevant scripts. Worse, the linked versioning -- adding a date version number as a parameter -- used by Joel and crew has seen the cached scripts invalidated frequently.

It's too bad there wasn't a, err, "function-level linking" for JavaScript, automatically eliminating all of the unused script from pages that don't require it.

One of the better sites for mobile browsing is Google: Recognizing the limits of the device (presumably by noting the Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220) user agent string -- not sure why it says 176x220 when the actual resolution of the device is 320x200), it renders a pared-down (even more!) version of the search engine, better still automatically proxying search results through an agent that filters pages down to more mobile friendly forms. Very nice.

It's a good thing that Google filters results, as many sites just render terribly in the small confines of QVGA on a Windows Mobile 5 device.

Obviously the mobile browsing market is a tiny, but growing, contingent of users, but it is something I'm going to pay more heed to. Too often we presume that everyone has a 7Mbps high speed pipe feeding an ultra high resolution display, when that isn't always the case. As smartphones continue to take off, and providers facilitate use by easing off on the restrictions and excessive charges, it's going to become a very important market.