Surfing the web on your mobile phone used to be frustrating. Users of early Wap phones, which gave access to the internet on the move, found many websites didn’t work, while those that did were often poorly designed and difficult to read.

How things have changed. Great advances have been made recently in the number and quality of websites. You can now see news headlines on your handset’s screen, watch video clips, Google, check your Hotmail account, even monitor eBay auctions. So it’s no surprise that the number of people accessing the internet in this way has already this year topped 16m in the UK, according to the Mobile Data Association.

In part these developments are thanks to the growing sophistication of handsets, which have bigger screens, more processing power and faster web-connection speeds. But website developers are also fast realising that they need to make their sites work properly on phones. This means stripping out unnecessary clutter such as pop-up advertisements, resizing pictures, reformatting text and making words big enough to be readable. In short, a wholesale redesign.

Realising that in the future the mobile phone will be the way a huge number of people will read news, watch film clips and get football results, information providers such as the BBC and Times newspapers are working flat-out to gear their output to the small screen of the 21st century.

You’ll need a 3G handset to really make use of the mobile web, but do ensure you check your mobile tariff before surfing. Many price plans are extortionate and charge for the amount of data you download. A single 5MB pop video download can cost as much a £15 on O2’s Pay & Go Original tariff, for example. These prices will come down as the medium catches on, but for now, if you plan to spend a lot of time online with your mobile, it’s worth considering an “all you can eat” package, where you pay a set amount per month for access.

SURFING

The big problem with surfing the web using a phone is that not all sites are designed to be viewed on a mobile’s small screen. You can get round this by installing the Opera Mini browser on your handset, which can be downloaded directly to your phone for free from www.operamini.com. This browser employs clever filtering technology to make pages more readable, and works by stripping out the flashy animations and huge pictures on some sites, though it’s not perfect.

Another option is to search the web using Google’s dedicated mobile search engine (mobile.google.co.uk). This uses a similar technology to Opera, and adapts web pages so that they don’t appear as a horrendous jumble on your handset. Unlike Opera there is no software to download with Google – you simply use the search engine on the phone as you would on your computer. However, Opera does a better job of adapting pages.

ENTERTAINMENT

Watching YouTube has become a global obsession, and now the video-sharing site has a mobile-friendly version. Launched last week, m.youtube.com is the place to go for your favourite clips.

There are scores of terrible mobile phone games, but you can avoid the chaff by heading to the review site www.pocketgamer.co.uk/mob. Here you will find all the information about the games it reviews, including which handsets they will work with, and where you can download them.

Mobizines are cut-down versions of magazines that have been made specially for viewing on your mobile. First you must download software from www.mobizines.com. You can then sign up to the titles you want, and these are delivered to your handset as soon as they are released. Current magazines on offer include the NME, Auto Express and Men’s Fitness. This well designed software works particularly well on handsets with sizeable screens such as Nokia’s popular N series.

There are few decent music download services for phones, but MusicStation (www.omnifone.com) is set to launch this year. Billed as an iTunes-style service for mobiles, it says it will offer fans the opportunity to listen to as much music as they want for a subscription of £1.99 per week.

COMMUNICATION

If you have a webmail account, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail, you can now monitor your inbox by downloading a free email tool to your handset. This automatically accesses your messages and formats them for your phone. Hotmail users should head to mobile.live.com; Gmail is available from googlemail.com/app, and the Yahoo! version can be downloaded from uk.mobile.yahoo.com. As an alternative to emailing, these providers also offer free Instant Messaging software for phones – cheaper than sending texts.

Twitter is a new web-based service that allows you to keep friends updated on your activities throughout the day. You must first sign up at www.twitter.com on a standard computer and tell the service who your friends are (they must be signed up too). Then you can text a message to the site (via a UK number), and your text will be posted on the website for your friends to read.

Vodafone offers a version of MySpace formatted for your handset. Simply select the MySpace software on the Vodafone Live! page at tinyurl.com/yrmutt, tell the site your phone number and the program will be sent directly to your phone.

If you would rather say it with pictures than words, www.radar.net is a smartly designed site that allows you to post snaps online from your camera phone. You take the picture and send it to the site as a picture message; it is published on the Radar website within seconds.

INFORMATION

Instead of wasting time surfing, why not have all of your favourite sites accessible from one page? The Nokia-backed Widsets site (www.widsets.com) allows you to create your own portal page on which you can receive constantly updated information from various sites. So you can search Wikipedia and keep an eye on the latest news. It’s easy to set up, free to use and a cinch to manage.

The National Rail Enquiries mobile site (wap.nationalrail.co.uk) delivers details of your next train with minimal fuss. And should you find yourself stranded outside a station, Google comes to the rescue with its Mobile Maps (www.google.co.uk/gmm). Tap in your current street name and destination, and Google will provide turn-by-turn directions with a clear on-screen map for guidance.

For regular SMS updates sent to your phone on sport, news and financial market information, head to the Times Online website (tinyurl.com/2pmwst) and sign up. These text updates cost 25p each. But if your phone comes with RSS-feed software (the Opera browser has it built in) you can subscribe to any website with a compatible news-update service for free.

COOL TRICKS

Orb (www.orb.com) is astoundingly clever free software that, once installed on your home PC, allows you to access from a 3G phone all the video material, audio or photos stored on the computer. In theory this means you can watch videos stored on the PC on the way to work. However, in our tests it took a rock-solid 3G connection for successful streaming. Without a solid connection you can still show digital photos to friends or retrieve a document you left on your computer.

Lose your mobile and you lose your contacts, but you can avoid the anguish by first safely storing them online on the free Mobyko service (www.mobyko.com), from which they can be downloaded to a new handset.

Tend to forget to set your Sky Plus to record? Then let the Remote Record service (tinyurl.com/l5aed) help you. It provides two ways to remotely set your recorder – either by downloading the programme guide to your phone, then selecting what to record, or by sending a text message if you know what you want.