SlideShare Mobile – Best Viewed With Opera Mini!

SlideShare, the site where you can share and view PowerPoint and other presentations online in a web based viewer now has a mobile version at m.slideshare.com

It works pretty well as long as you have the right mobile browser. You can search for presentations, view the slides and if you log on, save them online or download them to your phone.

Unfortunately, Slideshare is quite picky about what browsers it will play nice with. As far as I can tell, it only supports the iPhone, Android G1, S60 Webkit, Mobile Internet Explorer and Opera Mini. If you visit m.slideshare.com with any other mobile browser (even Opera Mobile!) you will only see a static page (image below) advising you to use Opera Mini or Yahoo Go! with no way to get to the Slideshare content. Which seems overly restrictive. The site’s pages aren’t that big, only 30-45 KB. There’s a little JavaScript but everything seems to work fine with JavaScript turned off.

I’m a big fan of Opera Mini and use it all the time. But the problem with requiring Mini or Go is that a lot of phones on North American operators can’t use them. Verizon and US Cellular feature phones don’t support Java apps like Opera Mini and Yahoo Go and T-Mobile USA blocks third party apps from connecting to the web. Yet many phones on these networks have Netfront, Teleca, Opera Mobile or Nokia browsers that I’m almost positive could display Slideshare Mobile. It’s great to recommend Opera Mini and Go but Slideshare needs to add a “Try to use Slideshare with your current browser…” link. With even more browser diversity than the full web, the mobile web web has an even greater need to be browser independent. I guess we need a Viewable With Any Mobile Browser campaign.

It looks like SlideShare mobile is built with the Yahoo Blueprint platform. I don’t know if it’s SlideShare or Yahoo that’s enforcing the supported browsers only nonesense but it’s really pretty stupid, especially for a site that’s in Beta. The purpose of a Beta used to be to test in real world conditions with real users and as many environments as possible to find what doesn’t work and fix it. Lately Beta seems to have become marketing speak for “New and cutting edge” rather than an actual testing phase. Still, Beta or not, requiring the use of a specific mobile browser is as bad as all those sites a few years ago that would only let you in if you were using Internet Explorer! Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Technology/Internet

Ratings: Content Usability