Algarve surfing
In the sunny Algarve, midway through a relaxing vacation, we received news that our return flight may be cancelled due to a strike at the airline. As a matter of course, vacations in our family entail a removal from connectivity. The office is left firmly behind. My mobile phone was put away. The impending strike suddenly made me feel vulnerable. We could be stranded. (Nice place to be stranded, though.) Fortunately, I had a loan of an alternative phone, with Web access, so I found myself propped in a chair, glass of wine beside me, pool in front of me, and a mobile Browser in my hand.
News sites tend to be pretty good on the mobile Web these days. The BBC does an excellent job. Even my home station (RTE) does a pretty good job with their mobile offering. The articles are re-written by people to be short, to-the-point, and unencumbered by pretty pictures or diagrams. Individual pages tend to download fairly quickly, and render quite well. Unfortunately, after reading a news article you have to return to the list of articles in order to find the next article to read. The list is not cached, so you have to download the entire list again. Even if the list has not changed in the minute it has taken you to read the previous article. It would have been so easy to add a cache header so that the page would be cached for a while. Instead, I had to put up with repeated delays.
Still, the mobile news service helped me to keep up with developments in the threatened piliots’ strike.
Once I had a bearing on what was happening, it was time to discover what the airline had to say about things. Unfortunately, their Web site was not mobile friendly. In fact, it was very unsympathetic to mobile devices. Big images, that make the page look pretty on big monitors, take forever to download to a mobile browser. Then they don’t fit, or exceed the memory capacity. The complicated layouts can crash a mobile browser. The strike was a big news item for them, so they had a link to it on their home page, but you couldn’t get to their home page without first going through a preliminary (highly graphical) home page that asks what country you are in. Eventually I found the link to the notice about the strike, and the plans being put in place. I was thankful that this was not a PDF document.
One of the options was to reschedule our flight, which would require going through a series of Web forms and eventually getting a new e-ticket to print out and bring to the airport. In the absence of a printer, this could be tricky. Another glass of wine convinced me to just play things cool and see what happens. No rescheduling for us.
Of course, in case things went pear-shaped, I needed to let people back at home and the office what our plans were. Home was easy, but as I was using a borrowed phone, I did not have numbers in speed dial. The alternative was to use the browser to access email via the Web interfaces. I have to use this route as my Web visibility means my email address is well known, and I receive 100s of spam message. My office server and my email client on my laptop take care of filtering most of this. The mobile email client would not be up to the task. The Web email interface was the only option.
Microsoft’s Web email interface is pretty good, though it does require many page loads to get a single message together. It’s a separate page for the To, the Subject, the priority, the body etc. Thankfully it also has the means to resolve email addresses based on partial input. It was slow, but it was functional, and I was happy.
I also tried accessing my personal email account using my ISP’s interface. This turned out to be horrible. Not surprisingly, they assume that every user of their Webmail service will be connecting via a big browser. The log-in page is fine. Just a simple form. But the main page has a big menu of options down the left, and each menu option is a short, wide graphic. None of the images are cacheable. They take forever to download. With images turned off, the Alt text value is displayed, but because the images are short, the text is cropped so that you can only see the tops of the characters. I found it slow and painful to navigate their page on the limited space of the mobile browser.
Using the Webmail system was torture. It was also hard to send messages because the session timeout was so short, and you know how long it takes to write some text using a mobile phone keypad.
For a few days I surfed a little with the mobile browser. Sometimes the experience was good, most of the time it was frustrating. There’s a long way to go yet.
Eventually the strike was called off, just hours before I vacation came to an end, so we got home OK. Perhaps if I hadn’t borrowed a Web phone my vacation would have been even more relaxed. Something to think about.
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