I have a love-hate relationship with the Web. I love being able to stash all my stuff online--my e-mail, calendar, files, etc.--and access it wherever I happen to be. But I hate having to lug around a laptop and hunt down Wi-Fi connections.
My cell phone, on the other hand, has a browser and near-constant Net access. But the screen is too small for my aging eyes, and Web pages are too unwieldy to navigate using only my thumbs. Instead of making the screen bigger, I've figured out how to shrink the Web. Often I don't even need a smart phone (though I do need a phone with a WAP 2.0 browser). Here's how I bring the Web with me wherever I go.
Get thee to a mobile portal: All the major portals and news sites like those of the New York Times and CNN offer slimmed-down mobile versions without the graphical mess. In most cases you can just type "mobile" instead of "www" in your phone's browser; be sure to bookmark that version so you don't have to type the site's name more than once.
At press time Yahoo announced the beta of Yahoo Go 2.0, a portal with a nifty interface optimized for cell phones. But to run it you'll need a handset like the BlackBerry Pearl or the Nokia 6133. (My wimpy Samsung SGH-X497 wasn't powerful enough.)
"Mobilize" your favorite sites: Services like Skweezer.net can "skweeze" your favorite sites so you can see them on that teensy-weensy screen; via Skweezer you can also access your PC's address book, browser favorites, and POP3 e-mail from a phone. Or to use Google, enter any URL here and your pals at the search service will automatically remove mobile-unfriendly formatting so you can better access the site on your phone. Bitty.com's Mobileplay Network does the same for sites like Salon.com and (yes) PCWorld.com. These services work well on some sites but not other ones, so try before you fly.
Pack your blogs: Visit PhoneFeeds.com and enter the name of the blog or RSS feed you want to view on your phone. The site spits back a URL where you'll find a version of the blog customized for small screens. You can see PCW's Techlog blog, for example. And since PhoneFeeds numbers are sequential, you can add a lot of blogs to your phone quickly by just changing one or two characters in each URL. Some blogs turn out better than others, though, and hyperlinks within blogs tend to get stripped out.
Text, don't surf: Don't bother wading through Web pages when all you need is a discrete bit of information, like local restaurants, sports, weather, or flight times--use SMS (Short Message Service) instead. Send a text message to Google (46645) or Yahoo (92466) with the word "sushi" and your zip code, for example, and you will instantly receive the addresses and phone numbers of three raw-fish bars. (For more on Google texting, see Cell Phone Tips.) Yahoo's SMS goes a step further by letting you search for Wi-Fi hotspots, too.
Not all SMS services are quite so johnny-on-the-spot. 4Info (44636) offers information similar to that of Google and Yahoo SMS, plus things like jokes and pickup lines (don't ask). But getting answers took more than 10 minutes, and when I asked about Wi-Fi nets in Las Vegas, it served up a list of McDonald's restaurants. As if.
Stay synced: By the time you read this, companies like CoolMarks, Saki, and SharpCast will let you move photos, documents, contacts, and more from your cell phone to your PC, and vice versa. SharpCast Photo service, for example, allowed me to sync images across my phone, my computer, and the Web. Edit a photo on your PC, and the altered image shows up on your phone. The bad news? Many of these services work only with Windows Mobile phones (personally, I'd rather eat broken glass than use another Windows device).
Bottom line: Though I may not be able to ditch my laptop entirely, I'll be leaving it at home a lot more often.
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