Making a site Phone and PDA accessable?

[JeremyL]

I am working on a site (basically a niche service directory) that has plenty of competition but none of them offer a version compatible with cell phone browsers or versions downloadable for PDAs. So my question is, are there any real standards for these products?

For PDA's there is the pocketPC and the PalOS. So I would need to have 2 seperate applications developed that the people would download? THey could then run updates to update the directories on thier PDA's as needed? Are these the only 2 platforms I would need to do this for or are there more? Will these platforms view jpegs and gifs?

On the Cell Phones I am even more confused. Is there any standard browser for all these phone browsers? Will they all be able to see the same content? I am even more confused on how to do these now that some are color and seem to take pictures instead of only text now.

Any help or direction in these areas would be apreciated.

[jdMorgan]

JeremyL,

This might be of some help for PDAs [hotwired.lycos.com]. It's been awhile since I last read it, though. And I don't know much else about it. But there's a link to get you started.

Jim

[Brett_Tabke]

Might try Opera 7 and then do shift-f11 for small screen rendering.

Other than that, I think you can do "one size fits most" layout that works for pc's as well as small screens.

The biggest thing you can do, is keep your site free of gratuitous graphics, make the layout liquid, and try not to force large table sizes where they will have to scroll right.

The killer is when they have to scroll to the right too much. A liquid layout that can squeeze down under a couple hundred pixels is best.

Keep your generic menus and links off to the right, and make your content liquid left. They won't have to scroll right to view anything important (it's just a new version of the old, "keep it above the fold" trick")