Posted by There is a wide range of devices suited to a richer internet experience out there. Here are factors you should consider in getting a device for mobile internet access:
1. Screen Size: The larger the screen, the better your browsing experience is likely to be.
2. Text Input: Phones with a full QWERTY keyboard or a touchscreen generally make for a better internet browsing experience. That does not mean, however, that you cannot browse on phones with a regular mobile keypad.
3. Data capability: These days, the lowest data capability your phone must have is GPRS. If it has EDGE; even better. If it has 3G (UMTS); awesome.
4. Browser: The standard phone browser these days is WAP 2.0 or XHTML. Do not bother with WAP 1.1 and WAP 1.2 phones, as those are largely obsolete. WAP 2.0/XHTML browsers allow you to browse both WAP pages and non-complex web pages, while the others mentioned limit you to WAP pages.
5. Java (J2ME): By all means, make sure that you get a phone that has good Java functionality. Why? So that regardless of the capabilities of your phone’s in-built browser, you can always fall back on Opera Mini if and where necesarry. Opera Mini can be a lifesaver in many ways – in the areas of speed and cost-reduction (if you are paying by the byte) especially.
Founder of MobilityArena. Yomi’s journey in mobile started in 2001. Besides obsessing over mobile phones, he also started creating WAP sites (early mobile-friendly websites created with WML). He began writing about phones in 2004 and has been at it since then. He has owned over 200 devices, from Symbian, Palm, PocketPC/Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/BB10, webOS, Windows Phone, Firefox, Ubuntu Touch, to Android, iOS, and KaiOS operating systems.
