Did I mention I have a new phone? Well I do. A delightful Nokia E71 and it's got me thinking about what's next for web sites and apps in general.

I've had web access on my mobile for a good few years now, since my motorola V975 (which i see i could now trade in for a princely £2 via mazuma) in 2004. It was the first 3G phone I had, on 3 which I have always rated as a network and still subscribe to, but still most everything was suuuuper slow. But then again my expectations were suuuper low. All was well with the world.

My first mobile, btw, was a Motorola too - an 8700. Cooool.

Recently folk started turning up in the office with iPhones parading their smooth corners and touch screens, shaking their apps to find where to have lunch. I thought 'Right! Something has to change' so off I went to the 3 store and a few days later here I am writing this, all full of enthusiasm for the future of the mobile web.

One of the things I have been thinking these past few days is that folk creating websites and apps for computer users can learn a lot from the pioneers of the mobile web. Last week I had a bit of a run-in with Firefox on my PC. It probably wasn't Firefox's fault actually, but it took the brunt of the frustration and is still in the doghouse in favour of Opera v9. Anyway, I had about 5 tabs open displaying some fairly ordinary websites, yet the browser was taking up about 100MB of my PC's memory. My laptop has 1GB of RAM, not super-fast but not shabby, and there it was using 10% of its memory. On some websites?! Come on..!

The truth of the problem no doubt lies in a combination of issues: the efficiency of the browser, the features, content and construction of those websites, my PC's processing abilities and so on. But as a user these things should not even rise to the surface to interfere with my experience. Open a couple of PC-based apps as well, say something workaday like Outlook and Word, and next thing you know the whole thing will slow to a crawl. And of course my expectations for that sort of browsing are now suuuuper high.

Get a faster machine you say? I'd argue upgrading perfectly acceptable hardware in order to solve a poor web and computing experience is not the answer. If you look at the things going on in the world of mobile web, there is some smart work to inspire all creators in the web world. Some sites offer a very good, if not excellent, mobile alternative. BBC, Twitter, and Facebook are obvious examples.

And where these adapted sites aren't available, there are some canny approaches happening on the client-side. Browsers like Opera Mini, Skyfire and Safari are attempting to workaround the problems with websites by providing, for instance, pan-and-zoom functions and embedded apps like FlashLite so things like YouTube work OK.

This sort of innovation has a distinct whiff of the beginnings of the web proper, when site creators were forced to grapple with 56k modems and IBM 486's running Windows 3.11 to come up with a usable experience... in spite of the technology in many cases, not because of it. When you think my new phone, only on the market for about 6 months, has 126MB of RAM and a 369Mhz CPU, it's easy to see why this innovation needs to happen now too.

We have reached a stage recently where we have forgotten about some of those major hurdles which were the mothers of invention. We are spoiled with our ubiquitous 8 meg broadband, quad core processors and 22" flat screen LCD monitors to view it all on. These are all great - I'm a big fan of progress, and an even bigger fan of rapid progress.

But even with this level of progress we can run in into problems that perhaps could be avoided if we could learn a thing or two from the absolute focus on fitness for purpose the mobile web pioneers must have in order to deliver what they want, to devices that remind us about where this all started... patchy connectivity, (comparitively) low-spec hardware, beta browsers and small screens... and conjure up results that are bumpy, exhilerating new experiences that will probably change our lives.