After demo’ing an Audiovox 6700 for about three weeks, this past week I gave it back and took home the Treo 650. The Audiovox has a nice sliding keyboard with a landscape display option, but I didn’t like the Windows PPC platform and as a phone it was average at best. The buttons on the phone keypad were way too small and I could see relying on voice-activated dialing, which is just too much trouble. For this you get to pay an extra $100-150. The Treo on the other hand is particularly nice — I’ve been installing extra packages on it and am quite happy with it.
Of course I took a look at the blog in the Blazer browser, and although it does a nice job with a lot of sites, it mangles this one badly. Also not liking the fact that Blazer won’t allow you to interrupt or cancel a page download once it starts, I installed Opera Mini, and all is well — I can highly recommend Opera Mini for anyone wanting to browse on a mobile device. It displays the blog quite well and breaks up long pages, which is really nice on a handheld device. Next, I installed Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, so if you browse to this site on a mobile device now, your browser will (should) be auto-detected and served a light version of the page that’s optimized for mobile devices. I’ll still have to tweak that a bit, but it works well out-of-the-box. If you want the regular version on your handheld, just scroll to the bottom and there will be a link there for you.
If I get more motivated, I may yet set up mobile.subversiveinfluence.com as a lightweight option, but for now I think I’m set. Well, almost — next up is to evaluate u*Blog for mobile posting.
Hope you continue to like your 650, I’ve had mine a year and love it. I’m glad you mentioned Opera Mini, I’ve been thinking about trying it, and now I think I will.
One trick: In Blazer if I go to a site via Google (either by search or addy), Google does a pretty good job of adapting layout. I just visited your site and it turned out fine in my opinion. It was quick to load and seemed complete, although it was in a multi-page layout. You might try it just to see what you think.
Your Lite version turned out really nice, too.
The trick to Opera Mini is installing Java to make it run… but once you have Java installed (if you don’t already) you can also install a bunch of other applets that require Java. I notice Google also has a Gmail API for mobile devices… the mobile Google maps (including some Treo-specific functions) works amazingly well.
Only issues at the moment is I haven’t found an IMAP email client that I really like (still trying for a free one) and I still need to get my calendar talking to our Exchange server in real time. So far, so good though.
Now I know where to find a second mobile device tester ;^) You must have a different version of Blazer than I do, mine just did not acceptably render my site. Oh well. Just hoping I signed up for a large enough data plan…