By Robyn Wilder on Sunday, 19 August 2007
 Getting the latest edition of your paper sent direct to your handheld is a great way to keep up with current events. But how user-friendly are these mobile editions?
No matter how sophisticated e-ink displays and digital publishing become, it's hard to imagine a day when there isn't at least some demand for a cheap, disposable daily newspaper. That's not to say that printed paper is the best way to deliver news to everyone, of course, and newspaper publishers have realised that fact. The UK quality press has long since embraced the internet and offer everything from online versions of their print editions to dedicated web-only content, and much more besides.
No matter how sophisticated e-ink displays and digital publishing become, it's hard to imagine a day when there isn't at least some demand for a cheap, disposable daily newspaper. That's not to say that printed paper is the best way to deliver news to everyone, of course, and newspaper publishers have realised that fact. The UK quality press has long since embraced the internet and offer everything from online versions of their print editions to dedicated web-only content, and much more besides.
Reading online is a great way to keep up with your favourite newspaper when you can't get to the real thing (or just can't be bothered to pay for it), but not everyone wants to do it when they're not sat at a desk with a fast, reliable internet connection. But despite the increasing popularity of the mobile internet, newspapers have been slow to wake up to this new medium. Ringtones and wallpapers may abound online, but when it comes to delivering news in a way that suits your mobile needs, are all newspapers up to the task?
Out and about
While the flat fee charged by most public hotspots means that download times are a not an issue when you're web browsing on the move, there's a bit more to the mobile internet than that. Reading the news online as you sit sipping a cappuccino is one thing, but having to whip out your laptop to navigate through complex menus and nested pages is far from ideal when you're about to leap onto a plane.
Despite the spread of 3G smartphones, trying to make sense of a website that's been designed for desktop monitors on a 3” screen can still be a painful business — and that's assuming that the site can be displayed by a handheld browser in a meaningful way in the first place. Some handheld browsers will reformat pages to make the best use of screen space and this is helped by the ability of some sites to detect that you're browsing on a handheld and display a suitably different version of the site.
Most newspaper websites also generate RSS feeds of their content. These are great for people who regularly sync their handhelds with a desktop PC for later offline browsing, but beware. Most RSS feeds are designed to pull users into the site and even if you set your RSS reader's preferences to download entire stories, you'll seldom get the entire picture from the feed alone. For the most part you'll only see a title and summary, forcing you to click a link back to the site to get the rest of it — not much use if you don't have an internet connection at the time. More helpful are ‘digital editions' — entire sections or subsections you download to your handheld using a web synchronisation service like AvantGo. These sometimes require a paid subscription, but aren't usually costly.
Unless you're waiting for a severely delayed flight, you're unlikely to use a laptop in a hotspot to browse a paper from cover to cover. RSS feeds are good in this instance, too — you can scan them for interesting topics and click to read the stories of your choice on the website. Most newspaper sites even do the hard work for you by inviting you to sign up for desktop alerts and email bulletins, and some list the most popular and interesting stories on the front page.
If you don't have access to a laptop or handheld, or just don't want to whip one out on the train journey home, some newspaper sites let you print your own PDF edition of the paper, either in full or in part. This isn't great for your green credentials, of course, but stick to two-up, double-sided printing and you can keep your conscience relatively clear.
The Guardian
 The Guardian aggregates its considerable mobile content at the bottom of its recently-redesigned home page under the “News direct to you” section. Quite why most newspapers force mobile users to wait for an entire page to load before they can get at the links they want isn't clear, but at least The Guardian's home page renders relatively cleanly (if a little slowly) in a handheld browser. The site detects browsers using Pocket Internet Explorer and displays a streamlined home page, but it's still a bit of a mess. Click into a story or sub-section though, and you're presented with same page that desktop browsers see. The task of displaying it successfully is then left to your handheld's browser.
There is a dedicated handheld version of the site, but this requires a subscription with AvantGo. AvantGo's free service does have a 3Mb limit for content, but The Guardian does let you choose individual sections to download in order to keep bloat to a minimum. Alternatively, you can access an Avantgo-like text-only version of the site's main news content at www.guardian.co.uk/pda , but you won't find a link to this anywhere on the site.
The Guardian's plethora of RSS feeds are automatically aggregated in a free downloadable newsreader — Newspoint. Otherwise, you can just add each feed (homepage, sections, opinion columns and blogs) to your own newsreader application of choice. And if you have the time (and toner) to spare, you can print off G24 — essentially a PDF mini newspaper — for free. Stories are updated every 15 minutes and you can choose between just the top stories or other main sections. Finally, if you simply must get the full Guardian fix each day, you can pay for access to a full digital edition of the paper, with prices starting from £1.50 for 24 hours' use.
The fact that there are so many ways to access the content on The Guardian's website says much about the respect the paper has for its readers and their technological expertise — it even offers downloadable crossword and sudoku puzzles. However, it perhaps gives readers a bit too much credit — this is a vast site and could benefit from a few ‘most interesting' or ‘most viewed' story lists for mobile readers looking for a quick fix, or simply using a slow connection.
The Times
 The Times' mobile section also sits at the bottom of its homepage. It offers SMS alerts for sport, business and the Lottery, plus a mobile crossword (for £4.50 per month). You can also download its mobile entertainment listings service — “TheKnowledge” — for WAP-enabled phones. The initial download costs 25p, but all searches are free thereafter.
Otherwise, the site has a welcome list of “most read”, “most commented” and “most curious” stories, along with options for email bulletins, and an e-paper. This is a digital edition of the UK editions of The Times and The Sunday Times (including supplements), but they're not free — a one-off issue costs a laughable £2.50, though rates are more reasonable for longer subscriptions (and there's a free three-day trial available). The browser-based viewer is a bit clunky (and nowhere near as readable as a PDF), but the e-paper does mimic the real paper's layout.
The Times handily lists all its RSS feeds in one place — there are feeds for all topics, including its various blogs and podcasts. Strangely though, there are no obvious links to the blogs from the homepage.
Accessing the site via a PDA isn't such a joy. The site may look slick on a desktop computer, but the graphics are too large and the content too widely spaced for it to be much use on a handheld (it's interminably slow to load, too). Even switching a handheld browser to one-column view leaves the screen filled with unusable navigation elements that shove the real content halfway down the page. Since stories are mostly all text, they're perfectly readable once you scroll down to them, but that's small compensation. So until The Times at least optimizes its homepage for handheld browsing, you're best bypassing the awkward main pages by sticking with the RSS feeds.
The Daily Telegraph
 The Daily Telegraph has two main mobile services. Its free BlackBerry subscription feature sends the latest headlines to your BlackBerry or smartphone, and updates them twice in the afternoon. The second service, Mobile Telegraph, uses a web-to-mobile publishing application called Roundpoint to send a daily version of the site to your PDA or smartphone. This combines the day's articles on news, sport, travel and opinion pieces, strips out the pictures and presents you with lists of links that you can browse on the move.
Roundpoint can update your PDA with Mobile Telegraph when you sync it with your computer, or you can update it via Wi-Fi connection or WAP. Mobile Telegraph comes in two flavours — with pictures (2.5Mb) or without (1Mb) — and both cost either £5 a month, or £50 a year. The site also offers the usual SMS alerts for news and sports, RSS feeds, email subscriptions, podcasts and an e-paper. This is similar to The Times' e-paper, but it only has a 14-day archive.
A free service called myAlerts can send customisable newsfeeds and updates to your PC via a digital news publishing application called Skinkers. The software is quick and easy to install and you can control whether myAlerts take over your screen, appear as a flashing icon, or just scroll across your screen as a ‘news ticker'.
There's no PDA-centric version of the Telegraph site and the viewing experience with a handheld browser is a mixed bag. The homepage resolves quite well in Pocket Internet Explorer (frequent ‘script errors' that slow down the page aside), but it requires lots of scrolling around unless you switch the browser to a single column view, though as with The Times' site, actual content is shoved halfway down the page by the navigation links at the top. Although there are some clunky design elements everything is readable and navigable, particularly if you're already familiar with the layout of the site. However a handheld-centric — or at least a text-only — version of the site would be much more useful.
Financial Times
 The Financial Times site is busy even by desktop browsing standards, and it crams an awful lot of content onto its homepage — including an intricate navigation menu. Surprisingly, the site doesn't fare too badly in a handheld browser like Pocket Internet Explorer. The section ordering goes completely to pot, but the homepage and stories remain relatively usable. The navigation menu doesn't work at all though, so there's a bit more clicking required to get to the content you want when using a handheld.
It may lack a dedicated handheld site, but FT.com does offer three mobile services. The WAP service sends stories to your phone and FT website subscribers also get share prices, industry news and Lex, the FT's business and finance column. However, subscriptions cost between £18.25 and £32.50 a month. The FT Mobile news reader is a free application for Java-compatible handsets that lets you receive an RSS-like feed — you just pay for data costs. Finally, FT Cityline offers “real-time stock market information”, so you can react swiftly to any changes in the market.
Site subscribers can also sign up for news alerts and summaries by email (non-subscribers can try a 15-day free trial), desktop alerts similar to The Telegraph's myAlerts, and download PDFs of the print edition. Services for non-subscribers are slim, but thanks to the massive amount of content, there is a massive selection of RSS feeds to choose from.
The Independent
 The Independent offers RSS feeds, blogs and a free email newsletter every weekday. The site seems to have been designed to live up to the newspaper's nickname of ‘The Indescribablyboring' — it's mostly text and looks like it could have been assembled in Excel. This simplicity does make it the most handheld-friendly of all quality paper websites though, which is just as well as The Independent doesn't even acknowledge the existence of mobile users on its site. Open the site on a handheld browser and every page is readable and quick to load. So, the worst site for mobile users also turns out to be the best, which either means that The Independent's website is the result of a happy accident or that its designers are simply cleverer than you might think.
Conclusion
 Mowser reformats websites for handheld use on the fly
However, the web is a fast-growing medium, mobile access is becoming more commonplace and soon newspaper websites will be forced to treat mobile users as a priority audience. Until then, forward-thinking mobile newshounds get the best deal — downloadable editions, text alerts and RSS feeds and email subscriptions. But those with handhelds wanting to browse on the go are often left to hunt for mobile-friendly versions themselves, which means you're better off bookmarking Mowser ( www.mowser.com ) on your smartphone and viewing all problem sites through it — see our feature for details.
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