My daughter bought a new Samsung M520 cell phone for her father-in-law. She used the phone to check one of my sites, and it looked horrible. She checked a few other sites and they looked good. I haven't seen the problem, but she complained about not being able to scroll left and right on the problem site and the text did not re-flow.

I have checked the site using my Palm TX, and it works wonderfully.

The site is http://www.brighterdaycharities.org/

Using another cell phone, the site worked nicely.

I suspect this is similar to sites working on IE, but not on Firefox.

Is there anything that can be done to help a website work on hand-held devices?

What about sub-notebooks such as 800x480 Asus EeePC?

That's the stupidest thing ever, using a phone to surf the web. I surf the web and email on a PC, talk on a phone, and text with pen and paper. Old school, baby!

Ha, you're really out for Bill. I have a Motorola Q and most sites are so frustrating trying to load & navigate through, that I don't even bother. I don't blame the sites so much as the phone's crappy browser and screen size. From what little I've seen and heard, I'm sure an iPhone would be much better. Even with a small-resolution laptop though, it's be tough to avoid having to scroll for days to get around. I used to have a Sony PictureBook (1024x480) and even that was a pain. Probably the only reason I fear getting something like an EeePC. As much as I love gadgets and their ever-shrinking sizes, trying to make it work with a 2" screen and a 24" widescreen at the same time is gonna be a challenge. Might then start thinking about making 2 versions of the site with a "mobile" subdomain like some big guys like Google (m.google.com). http://www.coffeecuphelp.com/adam/images/emoticons/sigh.gif

I think that one thing you can do is set a handheld style, so that only items with certain classes would show, but my issue is that the sites look OK with some cell phones, and others mess things up wildly.

This is not something that will cause me to loose sleep, but I suspect the number of people surfing the web on a cell phone will just increase, and sooner or later, we will NEED to have a site that will work with a cell phone.

Before I would purchase a machine with 800x480 display, I would need to test it to see if I can even view the text on the web sites. These old eyes are getting more and more picky every day.

Nah. Just being silly.

I just can't see a need to view a website on something the size of a postage stamp or try to spell out 26 characters on a 9 digit keypad. But I suppose I'm missing out on being cool with my $600 IPhone or Blackberry.

Don't forget a couple hundred in accessories. You really are missing out... on insufficient funds charges for spending all your money on the phone & data plan

Besides spending all that money, you end up with something like an I-phone with a battery sealed inside and will have to spend another $130 to get Apple to replace it in another year or so.

I hear Apple is not very nice to their customers. You want the newest OS? Sorry, it won't work on last years hardware, you have to upgrade. Viva Le Microsoft - LOL.

OK, OK, back on topic.

Tom,

Have pity on this old man. What was the topic?

Any idea how to tell what browser is being used by these tiny devices?

I suppose I could set up a specific area and check the stats for that page and have different phones view the page, but that would require me to understand the logs. WOW, another learning opportunity.

iPhone uses Safari of course. Don't know about others.