Many people are talking about Amazon’s Kindle eReader device, and Russell has done some digging on how it fares as a mobile browser:

The Kindle is using Access NetFront to power the browser, and it seems like a combo of a basic mobile browser on the client with a server side proxy. It formats the markup as best as possible, but because there’s no scrolling in the Kindle, it does break up normal sites into into insane numbers of pages. There’s a default mode - which seems to ignore CSS and JavaScript, and a more Advanced Mode, which is marked as being even more “Experimental” than the default mode. The Advanced Mode actually displays CSS, however, so I can’t imagine many people using the default unless they don’t know otherwise. The connection over EVDO is reasonably fast, though the screen’s redraw time might make you want to cry a bit.

Here’s the relevant header info:

HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0) NetFront/3.3
HTTP_X_FSN: ABC123ABC123ABC123ABC123ABC123ABC123ABC123ABC123*
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR: 66.193.201.11, 10.0.52.11
HTTP_VIA: 1.1 (amazon proxy)
HTTP_ACCEPT: image/png, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*

Because the internal browser is already doing paging, I used the above info to make sure that I deliver full pages through the Mowser content adapter - as it was confusing otherwise - and it seems to work pretty well. If you get a Kindle and want to use the browser for any realistic amount of time, I’d definitely recommend using Mowser, as the formatting ended up being much more readable (if I do say so myself), and you end up with less paging because of the more compact markup, and reduced image loading. Here’s a high-resolution example of the New York Times on the Kindle via Mowser.

All-in-all it’s a slick little device. The navigation for the web is a bit wonky - there might be a way of making more “Kindle-specific” GUI features which will help, but in general if you were to choose a reader, the free mobile browsing itself is worth quite a bit