I decided to try out the web browser functionality of my cell phone. I use Verizon, and my phone is a Motorola vc120, which is no longer state-of-the-art by any means. Verizon wants an extra $5 per month for the service, plus airtime.

As I expected, it does work, but the tiny screen and especially the need to use the phone keypad for text entry severely limit the utility of the feature.

Some things look like they have promise. Mapquest has an apparently well-designed phone interface, but entering starting and ending addresses by phone keypad is very painful and very slow. Some of the newer phones have GPS receivers for enhanced 911 calling, and I wonder if that GPS data can be accessed for this sort of thing? It’s an obviously useful idea, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the phone people failed to allow it.

Weather is available from the usual sources, but again, entering the location of interest is a pain and the usual sources only give very short summaries of conditions and forecasts, which is consistent with the tiny screen but also borders on useless. You might as well use Jupiter, or a weather radio. There are services like WxServer that are aviation oriented and will provide real weather information, including Nexrad and satellite images if you have a newer phone that can display them, but, of course, for a fee. It may well be worth the fee if you are an active pilot, but otherwise the fact that excellent weather sites can be seen at home on the big screen (with a keyboard!) for no charge beyond your ISP’s fees, or for trivial charge (Weather Underground provides 40-frame radar loops and no ads for just $5/year), makes the fee seem a bit steep considering it comes on top of the cell phone internet fees which are in addition to the regular cell phone fees.

Regular web sites tend to have too much navigational stuff at the top to be usable with the tiny cell phone screen. Although I hesitate to call this “useful,” the LiveJournal friends page actually works quite will on the tiny screen, at least if you don’t have to many long-winded friends (people like, oh, me, for example). At least my phone only buffers a few tiny screens worth of text, so reading anything of any length requires numerous pauses to reconnect and download, maximizing annoyance as well as airtime usage. Entering URLs by keypad is, of course, amazingly slow and aggravating.

There may be specific uses, at least for some people, that make it all worth while, but $60 per year just to have the feature enabled seems like a lot for just the possibility that Mapquest will come in handy someday. The tiny screen makes most of the normal web largely unusable, and the pain of text entry on a phone number pad makes just about everything almost unusable, so it really doesn’t have much value as something to just mess around with, the way one does with Internet access on a real computer.