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A mobile home for the web

Web-browsing by phone is horrible. linton chiswick tries other options

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Today's Internet is, we're told, mobile. And yet (a few expensive smartphones notwithstanding) the mobile browsing experience is a bore. Mobile phones were designed to be... phones. A bigger screen means less room for fast and tactile input keys; a bigger keyboard means a tiny screen. What the young First Post reader-about-town wants for Christmas is a device - smaller than a laptop, larger than a phone - that will make surfing the internet on-the-go easy, reliable and fun.

For somebody who spends most of their time within range of
 

an open WiFi network, there are options. Apple's new iPod Touch borrows the iPhone's advanced touch-screen interface and spectacularly effective Safari browser, which renders pages just as you're used to seeing them on your computer.

The only negative is that it doesn't, as yet, handle flash files - so don't expect to see as

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many moving images. For your £199 (Apple Store), you do, however, also get Apple's most advanced video iPod.

Alternatively, Nokia's little N800 (£184, Expansys) does more. It comes with email and instant message clients, and its Opera 8 browser is possibly the best

 

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