Twitter’s Completely Redesigned Dumb Phone Site Was Tested on 300 Devices 13-07-2012

Smartphones rule the world, they're selling in huge numbers and, along with tablets, they make it clear that the reign of the PC is over. That's great and true for most European countries, the US, a few parts of Asia and so on. But the vast majority of the planet does not have a smartphone. In fact, most people don't have a PC either.

But they do have a "dumb" phone and many of these phones, dumb as they may be, are capable of connecting to the Internet.

Twitter's mission is to reach as many people as possible and it has, traditionally, done this via its free SMS service, which is available in many places on Earth.

Still, it's not content with that and has now unveiled a massively revamped mobile site, for simple phones, that looks and feels a lot like Twitter, the main website, the smartphone site or the mobile apps.

"In order to reach every person on the planet we recently released an update to mobile.twitter.com for feature phones and older browsers," Twitter wrote.


"We completely overhauled this client from the ground up, a process that resulted in a lighter-weight, faster client that looks and feels like twitter.com and our mobile apps. The app was overdue for an update on many fronts and we took the opportunity to refresh it inside and out," it explained.

It took only nine weeks, but it was no simple undertaking. The new mobile site supports some 13 different browsers (and you thought the smartphone landscape was crowded) spanning over thousands of devices.

The hardware constraints were quite severe as well. The site had to work without JavaScript, without HTML5 or CSS3 and it had to fit on screens as small as 240x240 pixels. It also had to work with or without images and with input methods ranging from five-way buttons to touch, pointer and so on.

It took a lot of planning and a lot of testing, and Twitter used some 300 devices for this. But the effort paid off, Twitter says, as the new site is considerably faster and lighter and, more importantly, retains the same structure on all devices while following Twitter's overall design and functionality.

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