BareSite.com: (baresite.com) is another mobile transcoder. I like the name,  it may sound like  a porn site, but at least you aren’t likely to forget it.

Mobile transcoding is a crowded field with some tough competition. I don’t use transcoders much any more since the advent of Opera Mini but new ones keep popping up and for good reason. There are millions of BREW phones from Verizon, Alltel and US Cellular that can’t run Opera Mini so there is a real need for transcoders. BareSite strips out most styles and formatting, even bold and italic, giving a basic black on white page. Images aren’t resized and large pages aren’t split so a lot of desktop content will still be too large to load on typical mobile browsers. You can turn off images from a preferences page which will allow most sites to load. BareSite tracks the sites you have visited and provides History, and Most Visited links. This has some privacy implications and it doesn’t seem to be possible to turn off tracking.

With some browsers BareSite doesn’t work at all. Using the Openwave browser on my Motorola i855, the text boxes where you are supposed to enter a url or search term are missing due to some invalid markup. With the NetFront emulator, BareSite claims that the browser does not accept cookies (it does) and that registration is required. The Register link returns “Page Not Found”.

BareSite encourages site owners to mobilize their existing content by providing a link to the Baresite transcoded copy of their site or feed. This is a good feature which Mowser also offers and produces better looking mobile pages that work on more mobile browsers.

BareSite is brand new – with some time to work the kinks out it may become an excellent transcoder  but for now Google, Mowser and Skweezer are better choices for mobile transcoding. Via Access on Main Street.

BareSite: baresite.com cHtml

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