See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01
generatedcontent.org
generatedcontent.org
why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all? The content on my website would have no relevance to somebody browsing in africa or asia. Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web. I'm not going to waste time and energy targeting a browser that there's approximately 0.00001% of somebody actually viewing my site with. and it's not like the prevalence of 100px-wide screens is increasing.
Therefore logically, this whole post is also a fucking stupid thing for me to to say, but once I had thought of it I felt compelled to post it anyway, due to a deep love of both recursion and swearing.
Personally, running a ecommerce site with low resources, places with high fraud and average shipping support aren't high on our list. So when developing for phones we aren't going to bother with the real low end that is common in these places.
For example, AdMob may be a great choice for your app in the US and Europe, but a terrible choice for distributing an app in China.
Expect to see more Western ad networks acquiring or partnering region-specific ad providers (I speak from experience, my employer owns both a popular EU/US mobile ad network and one of the larger Chinese networks).
Lots of reasons, depending on what you are doing. You don't have to though, and if you don't care then the advice on that site isn't for you. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful advice.
If I was setting up something like a global payment network, or any other service where accessing people with minimal browsers would be useful, then I would care about it a lot.
Actually they do. Over 90% of African's use their mobile phone for internet access. Around 5% of African's have an internet connection and computer. For people in the developing world, a mobile phone is 'good enough'. It provides them will access to email, facebook, and google.
I understand that you do not intend on making your content to African's-- my website has not been optimized for these devices. But, keep in mind that by doing this, both you and I are restricting our content from roughly one billion people.
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - Tim Berners-Lee
The idealist in me (especially circa 2004 when I had Wikipedia-mania) wants to agree.
It depends on what the goals of a site are. Is it Wikipedia? Yes, it should absolutely look good on 128x160 screens.
Is it a business? Well, then it depends on who your customers are. If your customers are worldwide and from a diversity of economic circumstances, yes, design for the small screen. But if you can reasonably assume that most of your customers use desktops, laptops, high-end smartphones, or tablets, then I don't think it needs to be high on your list of priorities.
And I find that discussion totally exciting, for websites where it's relevant. I just think it's silly to make this kind of thing (postage stamp screens or SMS availability) a norm for every website in existence ever.
The 'why should I care' question is writ large in a community of people obsessed with growth and efficiency — but, as much as I appreciate those aspects of HN's culture, assessing site performance on low quality devices provides a great opportunity to reach for the 'universal access' the web promises.
In the hindsight, it looks like Android was masterstroke from Google. It wiped out MSFT from OS market for handheld devices.
To go down that tangent for a minute -- I've been wanting to bounce these thoughts of HN for awhile.
I always heard people argue (when I was a wee lad) that Apple not licensing their OS freely like Microsoft did was a terrible mistake, as proven by their rapidly diminishing market share.
You could argue that, well, they're doing better now, but I wonder if this is a short term aberration. Their recent success seems to have been propelled by their innovation in the mobile space (much as their early desktop success was propelled by... their innovation in the desktop space), but I wonder if history will repeat itself: Apple does well at first, until competitors roughly catch up in terms of features, for cheaper, and with a more thriving market of third-party apps, and more and more people switch to the new platform and Apple's marketshare shrinks.
I'm sure many people have made this observation before, and have much more insight into the situation than I do.
My Nokia N900 has a screen 800px wide, supports CSS, can display inline images, execute flash, execute javascript. Yet a lot of the time I get redirected to the "m." version of a site, with bland default-font single-color text, perhaps an image or two thrown in if I'm lucky. I would guess the majority of the sites have just copy/pasted a list of mobile user-agents and use that to decide when to redirect to the mobile version. It's a pity that there's no simple way for the phone itself to tell the site what it is capable of rendering.
People in third-world countries don't care about the average U.S. site, and if they did, they would find someone with a computer that probably is 5-7 years old, possibly older, therefore they wouldn't be using that resolution.
What will be important, if you do care about them, is speed of load. Unless you are using GWT or other server-side user-agent sniffing to determine what to produce, then unless you have a mobile version of the site that the user probably won't use, then they will more likely than not be slowed down by your CSS3 and Javascript crap, that is- if you really give a shit.
Trying to provide usable news sites, etc. in the remote chance that you are the BBC is one thing, but 99.999999% of the time no one will care that your site looks good on a Nokia X2-01 and similar. They probably will care if it uses Flash and they can't view it on an iPad, or if it uses Java, or if it renders poorly, is hard to navigate, or is just too slow.
Most shouldn't obsess over low resolutions like that, and shouldn't use GWT or other methods of server-side user-agent sniffing to render content. And your CSS3 isn't going to jive with a Nokia X2-01 and the like, so don't even try that.
The most popular websites in the developing world are Facebook and Google. American culture is huge in Africa. Africans visit websites with information about American movies, celebrities, and rap music. However, less than 5% of Africans own a computer and of these, few can afford an Internet connection. Over 90% of Africans rely entirely on prepaid mobile phones to access the Internet. They do not use computers. I estimate that a billion or more people are using these devises to browse the Internet.
In addition, most feature-phones these days are actually pretty decent (webkit browsers, > 320x480 res). With S40 and Firefox OS set for growth I think we won't need to worry about the odd ones much longer.