Serious reading on an Android smartphone

I am still routinely assured, both by colleagues and clients, that "no one reads long-form articles on a phone". My response is always the same: "I do." If I'm feeling frisky, I'll probably mention that I read full-length novels on my phone, too. I am currently reading Moby Dick. Do these people even have smartphones?

Isn't that what they're for?

I have been reading books and feature articles on a small screen since I got my first Android phone three years ago. It always seemed to me to be a killer application. Unlike a paperback, my phone can be slipped into a pocket, so it's always with me. And it doesn't contain just one book or one magazine but an entire library, continuously enriched with fresh material of my own choosing.

Remember when serious reading required a pencil, a highlighter and a separate notebook? The smartphone replaces all of these in a single device. Individual sentences, longer passages or complete articles can easily be bookmarked, copied to a notebook, emailed to a friend or posted on Twitter with a swipe of the finger and a couple of taps.

And here's the real clincher, I can read in the middle of the night without waking up my wife by turning on the light.

I can see clearly now

And improvements in both hardware and software are further reducing the barriers to small-screen reading. The screen of my HTC Desire was considered excellent in 2010 - 3.7 inches AMOLED, 480 x 800 (252 ppi pixel density).

But the Nexus 4's display is even better - 4.7 inches WXGA IPS, 1280 x 768 pixel resolution (320 ppi). Contrast is better, and characters are sharper. In fact, the 'print' seems to me easier to read than that of many books, let alone newspapers.

Do we really need so many browsers?

Quite a lot of my daily reading still takes place in the browser. I now use Chrome for Android (free) and it seems to do an excellent job of formatting most web pages for the Nexus screen. I leave the User Agent on the default Android setting, and am usually able to reach the right level of zoom even on non-responsive desktop sites without any difficulty.

Many modern news and social apps include their own built-in browsers. The Google+ app for Android (free) opens links in the default browser (and on the Nexus Chrome opens very snappily). But my Twitter client, Falcon Pro ($1.49), and my RSS reader, Feedly (free), both use their own built-in browsers, as does BaconReader for Reddit (freemium).

Long-form reading in the built-in browsers of Falcon Pro (left) and Feedly (right).

I suppose the developers of these apps prefer to keep users within their own environments, though most do at least offer the option to open a link in the phone's main browser. But it still seems strange to replicate the same complex functionality three or four times on a single device. Wouldn't it be more efficient to rely on a single browser?

Night and day

I quite often save long-form articles to Pocket (formerly Read It Later, free) in order to - well, read them later. Pocket doesn't use a built-in browser. Instead, it strips out all but the essential components of the web page at the moment you 'pocket' it, in order to optimise the reading experience on whatever device you eventually choose to consume it. That optimisation is far-reaching. Notice in the screenshot below how Pocket dims both the three Android soft buttons at the bottom of the screen and the notification bar at the top, in order to reduce distractions.

A fully optimised reading experience. Pocket (left) and FBReader (right).

FBReader (free), which I finally selected as my e-book reader after trying just about every reader available for Android, performs the same trick. Indeed, it goes further by suppressing the notification bar altogether. If you haven't yet got into e-books, give it a try. Most classic literature (at least in English and French) is available completely free, and even a hefty novel like Moby Dick typically weighs in at only 500kB, so you can afford to keep several masterpieces on your phone.

Feedly, Pocket, and FBReader all offer 'Night' reading options, with white text on a black background. But I find black on white easier on the eye, and simply dim the screen's backlight to the minimum setting when I am reading during the night.

And so to bed

Clients and colleagues will no doubt continue to insist that nobody in their right mind would ever read anything longer than an email message on something as small as a phone.

But I think they've got it the wrong way round. I almost never sit in front of a desktop PC to do any serious reading. I'd rather relax in my favourite armchair, or curl up in bed with a good smartphone.

Web browsing on Android

How fast did this page load? Did you notice a delay? Slow page loading is just one of the frustrating aspects of the mobile web experience. Mobile browsing is improving - but slowly, and not for everyone...

The most significant factors determining how fast a page loads when you tap on a link on your Android phone are the site's design, the bandwidth of your current internet connection, the processing power of your phone, and the efficiency of your browser app. A basic understanding of these four issues is helpful if you want to optimise your use of the mobile web.

Mobile site design
Mobile website design is still in its infancy. Even when site owners take the trouble to build special mobile versions, their interfaces are often awkward. In other cases, in an effort to 'simplify' a site for mobile use, the content or functionality that you want has been removed from the mobile version altogether. And many sites have still not got round to adapting themselves for mobile users at all. Despite all of this, mobile browsing is expected to overtake desktop browsing early in 2014. Site owners, take note.

Practically, what difference can this make to your browsing experience? If nothing at all has been done to adapt a website for mobile, it will probably load slowly on your phone. And when it does load it will look very, very small, as the browser attempts to display the full width of a site made for a desktop monitor on your phone's tiny screen (below, left). Complex, multi-column designs make it especially difficult to read a site's content. You can double-tap or pinch to zoom in until the text is large enough to read. But then you may need to scroll left and right to read a block of text (below right). Site navigation can also be difficult. Buttons are often too small for touch control, and nested multi-level menus often don't display correctly.

A website that makes no concession to mobile browsing. Kiss goodbye to extra donations, University of Kent.

And if you want to fill in a complex online form - like the one the University of Kent uses to collect spontaneous donations from the public, for example - then forget it. If you're using a mobile, they obviously don't want your money.

At the other extreme are sites with mobile websites that are completely separate from their main sites. I use the Flickr photo-sharing service and, as you can see below, the mobile site has an entirely different look and feel from the main desktop site, with chunky, finger-sized controls and a single scrollable column of images.

My Flickr photostream - desktop version...

...and, on the left, the mobile version. On the right, the desktop version as it it displays in the Android browser.

The problem with Flickr's mobile website, like many made-for-mobile sites, is that the designers think it's necessary to simplify things (as well as reducing the size of photos and videos, to make loading faster). If the mobile version of Flickr has a way to organise my photos in sets and collections as I can on the desktop, I haven't found it yet.

Most sites that have built a mobile version will detect that you are not using a desktop, and deliver you the mobile site automatically. In the screenshot on the left above, you'll see in the browser's address bar that the URL of the mobile site begins http://m.flickr... This is now a widely used convention for mobile websites. Some sites go further and try to determine your mobile device's operating system, screen size, and browser, and deliver a version specifically optimised for these. Most mobile sites offer a way to override this optimisation and load the main, desktop site. You can often find a link to 'Main website' or 'Desktop version' at the bottom of each page. The screenshot on the right above shows Flickr's main site loaded in my phone's browser. Of course, it's slow, and navigation is awkward (the links are tiny), but at least it's all there.

The browser I use, Dolphin Browser HD - about which I'll say more later - allows you to change the User Agent setting from Android (the default) to Desktop. This fools the sites you visit into delivering their main websites by telling them that you are using a desktop computer. However, as I said at the beginning, mobile browsing is improving. When I started to use an Android phone in early 2010, I found most mobile sites impossibly dumbed-down, and generally set the User Agent to Desktop. Today, many more sites have mobile versions, and the quality of these has greatly improved. For speed and ease of use, I now leave the User Agent set to the default, and load main sites only when I need to.

Bandwidth
One of the early myths about mobile web design was that it should cater, above all, for users on expensive, low-bandwidth connections. Mobile users, it was believed, would never be interested in browsing your content, let alone reading more than short snippets of text. They wanted to get in, grab what they needed, and get out as quick as possible.

There probably are still mobile users like this. But my guess is that the vast majority are more like me. I don't have a mobile data plan and I never turn on a mobile data connection. In part, that's because it's so expensive here in Belgium, where I live. But it's also because I don't really need it. I have 10 Mbps WiFi at home, and 100 Mbps WiFi at work, and there is free WiFi in many bars and restaurants here. If you have a decent ADSL internet connection with a WiFi router in your home, then your WiFi connection there is essentially free, since you are paying for it anyway. So for you, like me, data charges are not an issue. We are happy to browse a site's content at our leisure. And we do read long articles (like this one) on our phones. At least, I do.

As far as I can tell, a decent router on a 10 Mbps internet connection is adequate for normal browsing. Some sites - especially those that are not mobile-optimised - are slow to load. But others load almost immediately. And I haven't noticed any particular improvement in performance when I'm connected to the much faster internet at the office. My guess is that the remaining bottlenecks are elsewhere.

Processing power
What can I tell you? Buy a new phone.

Mobile browsers
Short of spending a large sum of money for a new phone, the best thing you can do to improve your mobile browsing experience is almost certainly to install a decent browser.

The standard Android browser, based on the Open Source WebKit, is actually pretty good. The problem is that, because it is built into the operating system, it is only improved as part of updates to Android itself. Which in my case means never. HTC made a big effort to develop an upgrade to Gingerbread for the Desire, but failed. If I want a newer version of the stock browser, I'll have to get a new phone.

In fact, I have used Dolphin Browser HD since it first appeared in May 2010, soon after I bought my phone. Very full-featured at the time - with pinch to zoom, tabbed browsing, full-screen mode, bookmarks, and a host of add-ons offering specialised functions - this free app has continued to evolve with very regular updates via the Android Market. It now offers an extremely slick, reliable and fast browsing experience.

Some of Dolphin HD's functionality: left, tabbed browsing and the add-on toolbar; right, the New tab speed-dial page

Personally, I don't use either gesture or voice control (introduced in the most recent update), but some will no doubt like them. What is amazing, given the memory limitations of my phone, is that all of Dolphin's rich functionality is packed into an app with a memory footprint of less than 2.5 MB (after moving it to the SD card). HTML5 data cannot currently be cached to the SD card, nor is there a setting to clear the cache on exit from Dolphin, so if like me you are seriously short of memory you'll need to clear the HTML5 cache (from Menu > More > Settings > Data storage settings) regularly. But the app itself is not a memory hog.

One drawback of Dolphin is that there is no simple way to sync bookmarks and open tabs with your desktop browser. Continuous browsing, seamless across different devices, remains an unattainable dream, for the moment at least. I did briefly try the Android version of Firefox, which does offer cross-platform synchronisation. But at the time the app required a huge amount of internal memory, and I found it slow and buggy, with fairly frequent crashes. Now, I am waiting to try Chrome Beta for Android, in order to sync with Chrome on my desktop computers. Unfortunately, it's only available for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and later. In any case, it will have to be very good indeed to make me give up Dolphin.

Next post: Scarce resources 2 - Battery