> It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds.
I actually find it quite the opposite. I've downloaded multiple Android apps that try to improve the HN reading interface, and I still find myself using browser instead. The closest thing that I would describe as being "bad" on my phone is that the arrows are small enough that I sometimes misvote on comments. Otherwise, I think it works really well:
* Each comment is the width of the screen, so there's not much vertical scrolling needed
* Comments are still well-indented so that I can easily follow a thread by scrolling right or left.
* I greatly enjoy being able to long-press comment links from the main page to open them in a new window, and then long-press the OP link to open that in a second window, and be able to use the back button to return to comments when I'm done reading, or even switch back and forth like I can in Chrome at home.
The fact that the text is essentially in a 4pt font doesn't bother you? Or is that an iPhone-only misfeature? Because on my iPhone 3GS, the page is wide enough that I either have to have unreadably small text or I have to zoom in and repeatedly pan from left to right in order to read a comment.
That sounds like an iPhone-only misfeature. On Android, you can turn on "auto-fit pages" and your chosen font size is locked and the width of elements is horizontally limited with no panning left-to-right to read a single comment (unless they contain unwrappable pre-text, which I find the hacker news text formatter to be kind of bogus on (indenting always makes preformatted text))
I actually find it quite the opposite. I've downloaded multiple Android apps that try to improve the HN reading interface, and I still find myself using browser instead. The closest thing that I would describe as being "bad" on my phone is that the arrows are small enough that I sometimes misvote on comments. Otherwise, I think it works really well:
* Each comment is the width of the screen, so there's not much vertical scrolling needed
* Comments are still well-indented so that I can easily follow a thread by scrolling right or left.
* I greatly enjoy being able to long-press comment links from the main page to open them in a new window, and then long-press the OP link to open that in a second window, and be able to use the back button to return to comments when I'm done reading, or even switch back and forth like I can in Chrome at home.