Using jQueryMobile for a fairly lightweight “mobile site”, I wonder what all you experts say about selection sets. A (long) list of countries for example. To prevent excessive delays, I now split country selection in two screens. The first one shows A-Ö (A-Z for you English-speaking people), if I tap on B, the next screen shows a list of countries starting with B. Hitting the back button brings me back to A-Ö (A-Z), selecting a country takes me to.
It feels right, and it doesn’t transfer massive amounts of data that a) isn’t used half of the time, and b) doesn’t take time to render on slower mobile devices.
I’m not too concerned with database performance on the server for this particular selection set since the SQL query is static and resides in the cache 99.5% of the time.