Yes, you actually picked one I read daily. Generally using their RSS feeds to pick through articles though.

It sounds like your Palm might not be rendering the page width as a real browser (like Firefox, IE, etc) would. In portrait mode with a screen width of 320px or 480px, that center colum would squish down to be incrediably skinny. You simply wouldn't be able to "adjust it sideways until you have the articles screen filling the whole screen" if the browser was honoring that screen width when rendering. (That is unless Slashdot (specifically) just happed to have an article column width that came out to be 320px after a full crushing, which I guess is possible.) Either way, you can do something similar currenly:



The point was that the central column on Slashdot is a variable width div, which proper broswers will crush down width-wise until Slashdot's forced minimum page width is reached. Go ahead, give it a shot in Firefox. Change your browser width to 480px and take a look at that central column. I think you'll get the idea. For most variable width sites like this, portrait mode won't help without additional browser options.

The type of behaviour you desire would only happen if you were in portrait mode and the browser was rendering pages with a viewport width larger then the actual screen width. Perhaps that's what your Palm is doing. Either that or slashdot just happens to crush down to the width you like on your Palm.

The point is portrait mode itself isn't some holy grail for page viewing, it takes more thought and optimization then that to make it useful for most sites. Sure I'd take the option (mainly for other apps) along with pretty much any enhancement, but I'd much rather see Nokia working on other items.