I've been surfing the mobile web for a few years now, always looking for new ways to enhance the experience, first on my Sony Ericsson K800i then my Nokia 6210 Classic and now my Nokia E71. I don't think the mobile web is advancing as fast as it should be, progress has slowed recently and I think this is mainly due to the iPhone and the obsession with mobile apps rather than browsers. Sure, there are things that benefit from being in app form but you wouldn't access the web from your laptop using only apps would you?
Still, it's much easier to navigate the interweb now than it was back in 2007 when I started, here's what I currently use to get around the mobile space at the moment.
Opera Mini - The built in browser that came with all 3 of my web enabled phones were slow and hard to navigate with, this is because they have to download a huge amount of data for such a little device and using the back button (which I do a lot) has to re-load the page. Opera Mini is great because it's server assisted and sites you visit are compressed before hitting your phone, this makes it much faster because only a fraction of the data has to be downloaded. Another huge plus for Opera Mini is the fact that it keeps a cache of around 10 or so recently viewed pages so hitting the back button reveals the previous page instantly. I've tried loads of other mobile browsers such as Bolt and Skyfire but I find them all sluggish is comparison, mostly because pages are not cached.
Snaptu - While this is an app, covers quite a few different areas and I use this quite a lot. The main reason I started using Snaptu was the fact that it includes one of the best free Twitter clients, it really works well, it's easy to see replies and it even allows you to set up groups which makes it much easier to keep up. Aside from this Snaptu has a feed feeder which works well and allows you to post content directly to Twitter. Other things I use on Snaptu are Flickr (because the mobile version of the Flickr site is broken for Opera Mini) and The Big Picture which is great for flicking through amazing images of the current big news story.
That is just about it to be honest the only other apps I use are You Tube, Google Maps and Nokia's Share Online which I use to send photos to Twitter through Pixelpipe.
Mobile web sites I use a lot are Dabr for Twitter (or Tweete if Dabr is down), Google Reader (although it's a poor mobile version, best of a bad bunch) and Mippin which I use as a kind of mobile newspaper when I'm bored. Other than that, I just use the full web versions of everything else because Opera Mini handles (most of them) so well.
So, I'm getting about on the mobile web but there is much room for improvement. I'm really hoping that Opera launch a new version of Mini soon, it's still the best mobile browser but it's almost a year since the last upgrade and there are a few things like stupid font sizes that I would love to see addressed.
