An Entire Mobile Phone Through The Browser

The S60 Blogs are a source of all types of information, from application betas to marketing thoughts, and every now and again, a gem such as this post from Peter Harbeson. As a bit of an experiment, using his S60 handset, he wanted to see just how much he could do with his phone using ONLY the web browser. Peter was surprised to find that, somehow, he was able to do just about everything.

Peter’s list included being able to:

keep my calendar in any of several web-based calendars (Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, and probably a dozen others)

send and receive email using the web (pharbeson [at] gmail [dot] com, by the way)

send SMS using bigfoot.com

maintain a to-do list

view and edit Office documents using Google docs

listen to music

watch videos

back up data (although most of my data isn’t local, so it’s already backed up)

maintain and use a contact list — this is not as well integrated as it could be, but it’s possible

read ebooks

subscribe to and read RSS feeds

subscribe to podcasts (although I listen to them without the browser)

He goes on to wonder just what the benefits of an entirely browser-based UI would really be. Obviously currently there’s a network connectivity issue, but what if that was solved? How much easier would it be to ‘fix’ the UI or customise it to individual users if it was merely a web page?