The Voyager may have landed, but its mobile web browser has missed the mark

So, my phone dies on me the other day and I need to replace it. I love the iPhone, but I’m not with The New at&t, so I can’t get one. Well, this is not entirely true – I could purchase an iPhone and hack it to work on my carrier’s network, but I’m lazy. I don’t want to keep re-hacking it every other week when Apple does a firmware update. I am currently with Verizon Wireless, so I decided I would go for the next best thing and pickup a shiny new LG Voyager. But, why am I talking about a mobile phone on a blog focused around the evolution of the internet? Mobile web browsing, that’s why.

Mobile browsing is quickly gaining speed as a viable internet platform. With the rising coverage of third generation cellular networks nearly every mobile carrier now offers some form of data plan to its subscribers. Accessing the internet from any location at high speeds is becoming more and more a reality. As a response to this growing mobile data market, the standard cellular phone is being re-invented and a new category of mobile phone is being created – the web phone. Apple and at&t have spearheaded this new type of phone and Verizon Wireless and LG have responded with Voyager. So how does its browser stack up?

The LG Voyager uses a web browser built by an otherwise un-known in the browser industry called Teleca. This browser supports most JavaScript functionalities, but it only supports the antiquated HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE specifications. This slight oversight by Teleca causes many modern sites and web-applications (even some mobile specific ones) to break. The Voyager’s browser does indeed support CSS 2.1 standards, but many websites do not recognize the Voyager’s browser as a mobile device and so prevent mobile specific style sheets from being applied.

Both mobile browsers support the ability to zoom in on pages, which is an excellent offering for viewing content on a very small screen. The Voyager offers its zooming ability via zoom buttons. It does not truly “zoom” in on a page, but it rather mimics the increase/decrease font-size feature of many desktop browsers. Unfortunately, since the Teleca browser on the Voyager does not support modern XHTML coding semantics, this often results in some very broken layouts when zoomed in.

Regardless of some of the insufficiencies with the Voyager browser’s zoom capabilities, it does offer the ability to display the data in a mode more suited for mobile browsing. Effectively, this is just a limiting of the width of the browser window to that of the screen width, but this seems to work well for its purposes. In this mode you will still need to scroll down past the header and navigation information to get to the content, but it improves readability dramatically. This generally has the added bonus of moving non-content items like right-column advertisements down to the bottom of the page, removing much of the clutter from the view. A third option is also available to view pages in a text only mode. This is an excellent option for reading blogs, quickly navigating a site or reading information when your signal is low.

All in all, the Voyager is still a great solution for those who don’t have access to the iPhone. Its Teleca-based browser isn’t as polished as the iPhone’s Safari browser, but is still very capable of offering you with a usable mobile browsing experience – especially with access to a full QWERTY keyboard under the screen. Hopefully Verizon and Teleca will see the insufficiencies of their browser and begin making the necessary improvements to bring it up to modern standards. In spite of this, the addition of the Voyager to the web phone market will at the very least bring further encouragement to the industry to create usable mobile web offerings.