My Motorola/Windows XP phone began to die after two years. Wanting something that would let me keep in touch with friends over AOL Instant Messenger, I got a T-Mobile Sidekick. I was reluctant to get a non-flip phone, but so far I have only managed to make one unintended phone call per day. The Web browser is excruciatingly slow. I’ve found that most of the Web sites developed in the early 1990s work just fine. It is possible to log in, fill out forms, get results. What doesn’t work? The latest and greatest Web sites. They are too script-heavy. Programmers seem to have forgotten that although the average desktop has ever-greater capabilities, the average user is increasingly connecting from a handheld device. I tried using one of my students’ sites from last semester. They lifted some username/password code from a Ruby on Rails toolkit. It relies on JavaScript. The site is 100 percent useless from the Sidekick.

Have we proven that “the better the tools the worse the application?”