NET RESULTS:NO MATTER how you might fiddle with a bit of kit that you have to review in your spare time, nothing truly tests its capabilities like having to rely on it in an emergency.

Such was the case for three days when my broadband went down, my beloved 3G modem back-up decided to have problems and I was left with only mobile phones to get e-mail and access the net.

It wasn't simply that I needed to poke around online to check this or that, or waste some time.

I needed to do some fairly browser-heavy activity, such as getting into an online discussion group to contact some colleagues, involving an array of sign-ins and searching for posts.

I also needed to follow some group discussions elsewhere and do some administration on my own discussion board, accessing the administrator's control panel and all its complex structure and options for ticking boxes and filling in forms.

Anyone who has ever used a mobile to do even basic web surfing will know this is not the way that anyone in their right mind wishes to access the web.

Normally I would have just waited until the problem with my internet connection could be sorted and give my poor aching joints a break from typing, but I actually had to go online.

I needed to get on and off for brief periods during every one of those three days, so simply heading into the office or using an internet cafe was not an option. To be honest, I felt it was a little extreme to ask any friends to put me up over the weekend just so that I could use their broadband connection.

That left me with a number of mobile handsets and the iPhone.

I've had a review iPhone for a few months which goes back to O2 in about a week. During that time I have played with it - "play" being the operative word.

I have had fun wowing people with Google maps and also with scrolling through album covers and photo galleries, enlarging images with that nifty pinch movement. These are the main things people are impressed by, and it is always fun to amuse others with your review handsets.

I also have listened to music on the inbuilt iPod. I've made a few calls, watched a few videos, sent some texts. I've looked at the application store, I viewed a few websites. In other words, all the essential iPhone activities, casually used.

Then came my weekend of being Unplugged. Out came the iPhone and off I went.

As usual, I am afraid I didn't bother to read any instructions; I just dived right in and hoped my general ignorance about the device would be compensated for by Apple's usually excellent intuitive design. This proved to be the case.

As I jumped at full speed into sending e-mails, accessing websites and then drilling down into layers of menu options on my discussion board, I was amazed at how easy it was to figure out how to do something I needed to do.

First off, the beautiful crisp screen makes it far easier on the eye to view a page than on most handsets. I used the swipe movement to rapidly scroll across web pages and the pinching movement to enlarge any part of the page and quickly access what were otherwise impossibly small login forms.

How to enter a user-name? I stopped, wondering how to access the touch keyboard. I tried an obvious and simple move - just touch the blank space where you want to type - and voilà, darned if the iPhone didn't know what I was doing and immediately open the keyboard.

Being able to turn the phone sideways and have it realign the page to a long horizontal rather than narrow vertical plane made it far easier to read through lists of posts on the discussion boards.

Also, once I had the phone set up to draw down e-mails from a webmail site, it would automatically transfer them into my inbox so that I could read them without going online (and be charged for further data access).

In short, the iPhone is a brilliantly engineered solution for making web access easy and efficient - even pleasurable - through a handset. It was an excellent emergency alternative for accessing the web, which means it is a very good solution for the person on the go who just needs to check a website or two during the day and doesn't want to go find a computer.

I definitely would not want to have to rely on the iPhone alone for my net access - it was an absolute headache to have to be dependent on a small screen, while scrolling around a tiny website and having to enlarge portions of it was a slower and more involved affair than using a mouse on a computer.

No device though comes close for making mobile web-surfing - even extended web-viewing - an intuitive, productive task.

klillington@irish-times.ie

blog: www.techno-culture.com