I've been using a Blackberry 8700 for a while, and have been using the default configuration for the web browser. It's been very stripped down, but fast. I've made it work for a number of sites, but it fails for JavaScript items and generally has problems.
I turned on the following features inBrowser > Options > Browser Configuration:- Support HTML Tables
- Use Foreground and Background Colors
- Support JavaScript
- Allow JavaScript popups
- Support Style Sheets
Now my Google Reader is much prettier, and looks like Google. My Google Calendar displays all-day events with a background color, much in the same way we expect for the desktop. Now I can navigate LinkedIn far more easily.
Wow. I just advanced three years in technology.
This post was prompted by a question to the wmlprogramming mailing list from a programmer who wanted to use tables in XHTML and knew that tables worked on many Blackberries. Alas, most users will not think to turn on such things, so they only work for a very small percentage of Blackberry users.
Note : it’s technically possible to detect on server-side that CSS, tables and javascript are disabled (look at the uaprof-diff sent by the blackberries with the latest firmwares).
So, if you want, you can warn your users that all functionnalities of their device are not activated and tell them how to do it.