The anonymous blogger known as the “Boy Genius” or BG is famous for publishing scoops about future gadgets and mobile products. A lot of  BG’s scoops involve leaked documents, photos and sometimes complete reviews of devices the BG has somehow managed to get his hands on months before there official release. Among the more notable BG scoops, he was the first to reveal the Blackberry Pearl with pictures and video before anyone had so much published a rumor about a trackball equipped Blackberry.  Then there was the BG’s leak of the  Blackberry Clamshell, which Seeking Alpha claimed caused Blackberry’s stock price to jump 5%.  Recently, BG published a  full review of the Nokia E71 with pictures and video three weeks before the phone was even announced.  I especially enjoyed BG’s leaks of  Verizon’s “iPhone 3G Myths” internal sales document and AT&T’s counterpoint telling sales folks how to pitch the iPhone’s superiority over Verizon’s Blackberry Storm.  Great stuff, I don’t know how the BG does it but I can’t get enough of it.

There are a lot of things I don’t know about the BG like what’s his name?, is he really a minor?, where does he get his information?  Add one more, until yesterday, I didn’t realize that there was a mobile web version of the Boy Genius Report. When I was looking for Android Reviews I happened to hit the BG’s site with Firefox’s User Agent Switcher Extension set to impersonate some handset and there it was, Boy Genius Mobile.  It was launched Sept. 14th according to this BG post and uses a modified version of Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition. Browser detection is used to deliver a mobile formatted version to recognized handsets visiting any page on the boygeniusreport.com domain.  You can force the mobile version in a desktop browser or unrecognized mobile by going to boygeniusreport.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?ak_action=accept_mobile.

The Alex King plugin delivers a “PDA” formatted rather than a full mobile site.  There’s no pagination and images aren’t re-sized so page size can get pretty large, over 100 KB including images.  That’s not a problem for smartphones including Blackberries or even modern feature phones with one of the better mobile browsers (Nokia, Obigo or Netfront).  But anyone sporting a device with a Motorola MIB or Openwave browser will definetely encounter some “out of memory errors” browsing BGR Mobile.  If that happens to you, I highly recommend using Opera Mini if possible.  If you can’t use Mini  you are probably on Verizon or another BREW carrier and you have my sympathy.  Try using a transcoder like Google’s GWT, Mowser or Skweezer to cut BGR Mobile down to size.

Mobile Link: boygeniusreport.com

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Filed in: Mobile Site Directory – Technology/Mobile/News – Reviews