The Blackberry is a popular device, no question.  It’s got a decent sized screen, good keyboard and it’s easy to access the internet on it.  So why is the browser deliberately throttled to give the poorest user experience possible on most websites?

Any half decent web designer wouldn’t think of creating a website without using CSS so consequently all but the very worst sites rely on stylesheets to work.

Given this, why is the CSS support for the Blackberry browser turned off?  It’s not as if the browser can’t support CSS, it can, but you have to trawl through the menus to find the option to enable it.  Most user’s aren’t going to do this, so we have to deisgn Blackberry sites to the lowest common denominator.

This means a very Web 1.0 feel for sites viewed on the Blackberry which doesn’t exactly encourage the use of the mobile internet for one of the devices most suited to it.

Many mobile sites we see either don’t recognise the Blackberry or don’t care as they still try to load a stylesheet and rely on it for the look of the page.  This gives a poor user experience.

We normally tweak our sites for the non-CSS Blackberry so that they at least get a decent look and feel.  Fortunately the platform we use to deliver mobile sites,  bemokoLive ,  will recognise if the Blackberry has CSS enabled and deliver the best looking version of the site to those users lucky enough to have found the option.  Those who haven’t found the option will, at least, get a site that has been designed with no stylesheets and so will hopefully come back for more.