Best of the Mobile Net

Note: Don't miss our slide show of 15 mobile Web sites we deemed essential.

Illustration: Mick Wiggins

You can see a lot of the Internet on a mobile phone these days. More developers are offering stripped-down, mobile versions of their Web sites (find PC World's at mobile.pcworld.com), and more handsets can display the full sites themselves. Of course, the experience remains far from perfect. Sometimes you get a site's mobile version; other times you don't. Your hardware and your cellular connection can limit your speed. And then there's your cell phone's preinstalled browser: While designed, in theory, to work with your cell-phone hardware, it can force you to scroll around endlessly, it can mangle Web pages, and it can't yet fully display Flash content. For other options, see "Top 5 Third-Party Browsers" on the last page of this article.

But if you have the right setup, getting instant access to driving directions, the latest headlines, and other online content becomes downright addictive. To test the five predominant Web browsers, we grabbed a representative smart-phone handset and loaded some mobile Web pages and lots of standard Web pages (the true test). We checked JavaScript support, and measured the speed at which each browser rendered individual pages.