The ability of browsers to automatically load a page when they start up is a great time-saver. Not having to type in your favorite URL every time already adds a lot of efficiency to your workflow. Especially if your smartphone or PDA doesn't feature an ergonomic thumbboard that facilitates text input.

But you can take that one step further. Instead of setting the home page to say, your favorite search engine or portal. You can create a customized list of favorites, sorted and laid out as you please. Plus, those who know their HTML can put in special features, like thumbnails pulled from a Flickr account of a Google search box. Ewan Spence's article shows how this is possible.

Ewan's tutorial is nothing revolutionary, talking about HTML and setting a mobile browser's settings. But the best thing is that customized homepages work on virtually any smartphone with Internet access. Even if Ewan wrote for All About Symbian, the first part of his article (creating the list through HTML) applies even to gadgets not running on the Symbian OS.