by Ben Huot
ben@benjamin-newton.com
mobile.benjamin-newton.com
Help for Mobile Users
You can also browse my website on a mobile device.
iPhone and iPod Touch vs. Google Android
The iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android devices, and other similar devices can browse this mobile site fine including all audio. For Google phones, only Android 3 and higher will display the website without serious degradation of graphic quality as 2.3 and below don't support anti-aliasing of rounded corners or SVG. I now recommend Google Android 2.3 and below phone users use Opera Mini instead of the included browser. Everything is made available in standard web pages, PDFs or in iPod and iPhone supported audio formats. PDFs only work on iPhone and iPod Touch and failed to open in the Android 2.1 simulator.
Testing
The site has also been tested for compatibility with Safari, and in Apple's iOS Browser Simulator which is included in the iOS SDK 4.3 as well as on a real iPod Touch 4 with the same OS version, and it should also work well with the iPhone.
Be sure to upgrade to the latest iOS 4.2, if you have any problems viewing anything.
This site has also been tested for compatibility on the browser which is included in the Google (Android 2.1) SDK Emulator (excluding the PDFs) on Google branded mobile phones.
Blackberry
I have tested for compatibility on the Blackberry JDE simulator for the 8800 model (in Cross Over Office on top of my Ubuntu Virtual Machine) and the included browser can barely process a text only web page (I had to turn off stylesheets, tables, and images for it to load at a bearable speed). I have 4 GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo, so processing power couldn't be the problem.
I recommend downloading and installing Opera Mini as it will provide a much better web experience for Blackberry users (OS 5 and older). Blackberry OS 6 users technically use the same browser technology, as Apple does on its iPads, iPhones, and Macs. But, after recent experiences, with the Google Android browser, using similar technology, Apple's browser is much faster and also seems, to have less bugs, or the features are much better, due to the underlying Apple OS (iOS and Mac OS X).
Opera Mini
Opera Mini now works with this mobile version of my website.
This only applies to the web pages and pictures. You may or may not be able to open the PDFs or multimedia, if you have the appropriate additional software.
Opera Mobile is an entirely different product which may or may not render this site fine. The Opera simulator online only simulates the Mini.
Opera Mini will can successfully browse my mobile web pages in a simplified version, if you adjust the default settings. Under settings, change image quality to high. This mobile website has been tested successfully in Opera Mini 6 on my iPod Touch 4 under iOS 4.3. Opera Mini doesn't support PDFs. Amazon.com Fire's Silk browser will likely need similar adjustments.
Bloated vs. Efficient Websites
The reason why Opera Mini and Amazon.com Fire's Silk web browser work poorly, with my main website, is that I have worked on my website, for over 13 years and read about computers, almost every day, for at least 10 years. I use all the latest best practices and my website is as efficient, as is possible, without spending ridiculous amounts of money. I also update my website almost every day.
The problem that Opera Mini and Silk were designed to deal with is big sites like CNN.com, who are very sloppy memory and bandwidth wise, and so these browsers aim, to remove all this extra useless data, automatically. The problem is, that whenever computers are set up, to make difficult decisions, they usually end up not working very well, because, although computers can process data very fast, they are very dumb at things, like analysis or synthesis. And websites are very complicated and are getting more and more complicated very rapidly.
There are many different ways to solve, the very different problems, that different websites are designed, to deal with. So, in the simplest terms, a browser, like Amazon's or Opera's compress graphics and fiddle with site formatting, assuming your website is designed the same way, as these large corporate websites are and, in the process, end up making graphics unreadable and breaking all the interactive elements of a website.
Simply put, there is very little you can do, to make my website more efficient and trying to do so will screw things up. To make sure it doesn't over compress my images, I could just send really high resolution images, which would make everybody else's access very slow, or I could make an entire site just for Amazon.com's web browser, but I am not going to do that.
But the biggest problem with these web browsers is that they assume that no one ever updates anything on their website, so you are often given an outdated version of my website, which could likely make it inaccessible, as I change many parts very often. This also makes it hard to test with, because it makes it difficult, to be certain, that I am (and you are) getting the latest version, of what I just updated.
