Whilst it’s taken a bit longer than planned the Expat Info Desk website is now compatible with mobile devices. Our entire site apart from our purchase pages (we’re working on that though we can’t control our payment providers templates) can now display any page in a tailored mobile template that will work better with the smaller screens found on mobile devices.
There’s no need to use a special URL to access the mobile version of a page, our website should automatically detect that you’re using a mobile device and display the tailored mobile template. If you wish though however to use our normal website on a mobile device you can just press the ‘Full site’ button at the top of every page on our mobile version (have a look at the screenshot to the right). Your setting of choice is then remembered by your browser for 7 days. You can easily return to our mobile templates from our normal website by clicking on the ‘View mobile site’ button found at the bottom left-hand corner of every page. You can even view our mobile template from a non-mobile device if you want though it’s not guaranteed to work perfectly with every browser.
You can access any guides you’ve purchased if you need to refer to a section whilst you’re on the move. No content has been cut so we’re working hard to make the navigation throughout our guides as easy as possible. You’ll find the full guide menu at the bottom of every page. Our Expat’s Manual and guide previews also work the same way.
Our mobile compatible templates have been tested in the native browsers of iPhones, Android platform devices and the latest BlackBerry devices running the BlackBerry OS version 6 of their software. It should also work on other mobile devices and older operating systems and this should improve over the coming months as the framework we’re using improves its browser support.
For now we’ve tried to keep our mobile templates simple and have removed all images and graphics. Do the icons we’ve used for each section make sense? We hope they do!
We welcome your comments and any feedback you might have, please do let us know if you spot any glitches.
George
UPDATE (13th April 2011)
I’ve been able to test our mobile version this afternoon on a dare I say it old Nokia e71 running Symbian OS, whilst not quite as visually appealing as other mobile browsers (a few minor bugs are visible) it appears to work absolutely fine. I’ll keep on updating this page as I find other phones to test on.
