Why are mobile phones still so terrible at retrieving and displaying even the most simple information from the internet?

Using your mobile to go online is comparable to crossing the Atlantic in a fridge-freezer; it’s the wrong size, the wrong shape, and better suited to other uses. The Cyberclinic inbox quickly filled with tales of frustration. “Sites fail to load properly,” writes Nina Regis, “it’s slow, it’s expensive, and the whole process is about as satisfying as being attacked by ants.”

Websites often look terrible or fail to load at all on mobiles – partly because the screen isn’t wide enough to even deal with a standard column width (468 pixels), but also because developments in web technology are obviously focused on computer-based browsing. “Pages with javascript tend not to work,” writes Janet McKnight, “so I can’t use eBay on my mobile, although that’s probably a good thing.” Until fairly recently, phones were restricted to accessing WAP sites – which are specifically designed for mobile viewing – but even these don’t always display properly across different models of phone. Significant progress, however, has been made by Opera Mini, a mobile browser which is easily installed and offers speedy access to normal websites. “It’s very clever,” writes Anthony Chapman. “It resizes pages and scales down the images on the fly, saving you time and money on data transfers.”

Squeezing pages down a mobile phone connection is certainly problematic. These days, the majority of phones use GPRS, which has a typical speed of around 5k per second – but as data is often given lower priority than speech traffic by mobile companies, transfers can slow to a trickle. Some sites cope better than others, however: “Google usually works fast enough to allow you to cheat at pub quizzes,” notes Janet McKnight. Phones with 3G connectivity can almost reach broadband speeds (around 50k per second) but this comes at a significant cost, and even the slower, cheaper GPRS service is proving too pricy for many respondents. “On my preposterously named PEBL phone,” writes Clare Nightingale, “finding the telephone number of my local cinema took a good ten minutes, and it cost me more than I spent on texts in a fortnight.” She’s not alone: I’ve often found it easier and cheaper to spend £1 texting All Questions Answered on 63336 than attempt any online research myself. But last week, T-Mobile removed metering on their 3G service and slashed the cost of accessing it by more than half to £19.99 per month; hopefully this will lead to reductions across the board for getting online via your mobile. But until then, our experiences will no doubt mirror that of Liam John: “I tried to email the Cyberclinic from my phone to see how easy it was. It was hopeless. I gave up.”

Next week’s question comes from Chris Dickson: Established wisdom says that you get more computer for your money the longer you leave it. But is now a good time to buy a computer? How can anyone ever tell?”