WapReview

Hasn't been updated since Feburary 2003!

Down since 09/04

Down since 9/04

White and Yellow pages. Reverse phone number lookup. Driving directions.

27-Oct-2008 - No longer a mobile site.

Down 02/05

Down since 12/04

Not a wap site anymore 2/18/05

None of the tools actually work!

Only covers 10 cities but when you gotta go this may help. Down since 6/17/2005.

A small directory of links.

Down 03-Oct-2008 - Returns a GeoCities 404 Page

Hasn't been updated since 06/12/04

Mobile edition down 2/16/05

Down 02/18/05

Down 02/18/05

A major Nextel user forum and download site. To use it, you must first register at www.hofoufn.com Down since 3/05.

links to around 300 Handheld Friendy sites divided by catergory

08/18/2006 Site Down!

Post and edit your Blogger or LiveJournal blog from your mobile. Down 5/14/05

Dead 12/11/04

Huge collection of eBooks including many classics. Down 3/08/05

Windows mobile news (updated infrequently) and forum. Down (domain parked) 1/22/05

iDEN user forum. Tutorials, downloads, questions and answers. If you have an iDen phone and want to get the most out of it, this is a great site. Registration required, you can register on the WAP site or on the web at http://www.djjeffa.com/ http://djjeffa.com/vb/wiforums/

Down 03-Oct-2008 - Returns a PHP error

Another good iDEN (the cellular protocal used by Nextel, Boost, Telus Mike, Southern LInc, etc.) site. Discusions, tutorials, downloads. Lots of interest in harware modifications and customization of this forum. Before you can use the WAP site you must register at http://www.wirelessmatt.com/forum/ using your PC.

Down: 06-Aug-2007

Information about London taxis along with phone numbers of various cab companies.

No longer has a mobile version

Apparently intended for offline reading using the the Avantgo.com service. Unlike many Avantgo sites this one has a public url, making it usable on devices that don't have an Avantgo client. It's actually pretty good, if limited - consisting of the full text of about twenty top stories from the News, Business and Technology sections.

Gone: Redirects to NYTimes.com - 12-Dec-2007

This is one of the "Mobilized by Unified Mobility" sites that I wrote about in Wow 31 New Mobile News Sites! This was a good site for a while with the full content of hundreds of articles from over a dozen sections. I bet this was a demo put together to try to sell The Times on using Unified Mobility's services. It must have been no sale as most of the headline links currently lead not to stories but to a registration required type message. Unfortunately, there's no way to register or login through the Unified Mobility site.

6-Jul-08: Site is dead, nothing but a blank page.

Launched in 2003, this is a strange caricature of a news site. The "stories" on this WAP1 (wml) site are a single sentence followed by the words "For full story visit www.nytimes.com." I guess someone who is paying by the KB and just wants to scan headlines might find this useful but why not at least provide a link to the full article!

Update 22-May-2007: Redirects to mobile.nytimes.com which delivers both wml and xhtml

Nextel's homepage is only available from within the Nextel network using a phone with a Nextel account.

The Nextel network and this site have been shut down.

If the official site doesn't have live updates there is an alternative. Local search site Go2.com has been diversifying into mobile content and their latest effort is Go2 Entertainment Awards at oscars.go2.com. Right now the site only has a couple of short stories about the Oscars, lists of nominees for the top awards. For each of the awards you can vote for your favorites actor or film, not that it will effect the outcome. Anders Wright from Last Blog on Earth is doing the Oscar reporting for Go2 and has some predictions on his (non-mobile) blog. Live coverage is promised when the show kicks off at 5PM Pacific Time.

It doesn't look like Go2 is covering the Oscars in 2009, the show is two days away but the page is still showing 2008's nominees.

A collection of trailers from nominated movies at mobile video sharing site Mogg. Mogg offers the option of streaming or downloading each video, however only the downloads seemed to work on my phones.

5-Mar-2010 Page is gone.

The Official Website of the London Games with latest news and photos, daily schedules, a searchable database of athlete statistics, photos and bios, ticket information, an online Olympic memorabilia shop and a dedicated page for each sport with information about rules and venues, schedules, results and bios of a random selection of the sport's athletes.

May-2013: Redirects to non-mobile site

InfoSpace Ski Report - If you're not in Europe and the state of your personal economy precludes jetting to Courchevel for a week of skiing, InfoSpace's Ski Report can help you keep tabs on ski conditions closer to home. The site covers all the major resorts in the US and Canada plus a good selection of the better known ones in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. Listings include current snow depth, number of open and closed runs and lifts and projected season closing days for each resort.

Something essential that is missing from Ski Report is weather reports.  There are links to AccuWeather.com on most pages but they link to the Accuweather home page rather than to the appropriate forecast page for the resort or region.

Although the site only scores a three out of five on the Ready.mobi test,  I had no trouble using it on any of my phones.  Page sizes are small (under 10KB) and there are few images so it loads quickly even at GPRS speeds. Usability is generally very good but, as with My Slopes, would be even better with the addition of Access Keys.

Infospace no longer offers this service.

Ski, snow and weather forecasts,  general and transportation information, guides to dinning and drinking establishments and user ratings for hundreds of ski resorts around the world.  Source: Tappity

Redirects to non-mobile site.

The mobile edition of Quicken's free online personal finance management service lets you view all you bank accounts in one place. It shows balances and transactions and tracks earnings, expenses and payments. The site also has an ATM finder.

Intuit no longer offers an Intuiy mobile web app.

Rugby news, results, live scores and schedules. Premium content including videos, wallpapers and memorabilia for sale. Source: Mobility.mobi

Parked domain.

Large selection of comic strips in English and Hindi including many favorites like Andy Capp, BC, Popeye and Robin Hood. The dropdown list only shows a subset of the available titles so if you don't see your favorites, try using the search. Source: Taptu Touch Web Report (PDF)

12-Jul-2013: no longer has a mobile webapp, only Android and iOS native apps.

Dine at the squeakyspoons and avoid the greasyspoons. View health department inspection reports for restaurants in major California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas and Washington cities

Shut down.

Called "A Foursquare for Beer Lovers" by Mashable, Untappd is a location aware mobile web app where you check-in with a beer.

You can get badges for when and where you check-in and for each different beer you check-in with. Users can add new beers including homebrews and keep a beer wishlist of brews they want to try. Untappd uses the Foursquare API for location support and works anywhere in the world where there's beer.

Other users can see your check-ins in their timelines and in a public timeline that Untappd calls "The Bar". Check-ins, badges etc. can be shared on Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook. You can also make your check-ins private so that only your Untappd friends can see them.

What sets Untappd apart from Foursquare, Gowalla etc. is that it's also sort of a reviews and recommendations site for beers.  When you check-in you're required to name the beer you're drinking and you can also give it a 1-5 "bottle" ranking.  Beer names are clickable and lead to a page with some information about the beer along with its cumulative rating and recent user check-ins and comments on the brew.

Untappd uses some HTML5 features and currently supports the Android, iOS, WebOS and BlackBerry OS6 browsers only. I tried a few unsupported browsers and found that it also seems to work in the bada browser but not with Opera Mobile 11 or Mini 6 or the pre-Anna Symbian^3 browser.

Untapped no longer has a mobile webapp

Dhruv Bhutani's MeeGo News covers the latest news aboutthe MeeGo OS. The site is operated in collaboration with Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine from CarryPad.com and Christopher McFann from Symbian-Freak.

Apr-2012 redirects to CarryPad.com

Frequently updated news blog covering US CDMA operator Sprint/Nextel. Written by an anonymous Sprint customer care representative it's an excellent source of breaking news about new Sprint products, plans and policies.

19-Jun-2012 Shut down by Sprint DCMA takedown notice.

Google's personal homepage/portal comes in two flavors; a basic WAP page for legacy browsers (bottom image)  and a much richer version that's served to iPhones and Android devices (top image). The rich version consists of mobile formatted versions of all your desktop iGoogle widgets except those that are Flash based. Each widget appears as a large button initially, which when tapped expands to reveal its content.

On my Android phone, iGoogle works great, it displays all the tabs and compatible widgets that I’ve defined in the desktop version. It doesn’t seem to possible to specify that specific widgets appear only in the mobile or only in the desktop version. All the widgets I tried; Twitter Gadget, Google News, Mail and Calendar and Ping.fm worked well.

The basic version of iGoogle that's served by defaullt to all devices except iPhones and Anoid devices doesn't use content from your desktop iGoogle widgets. Instead it lets you add add and arange content from a predefined list of widgets including, Gmail, Google Calendar, News, Bookmarks, Stocks, Movies and Top Search Trends plus news feeds from about 50 non-Google sources including the Onion, Economist, NPR, PC Magazine and E! Online.

You can force the iPhone/Android version to display in any browser by using the URL google.com/m/ig?uipref=6 In most cases won't look or work well with unsupported browsers.

31-Jul-2012 Shut down by Google.

Down 02/18/05

Book reviews from the prestigious New York Review of Books. Each edition contains 7 or more well writen indepth reviews of the latest fiction and non-fiction.

No longer mobile friendly

Six months ago I posted a piece entitled All I want is a good WAP RSS Reader comparing all the mobile web based rss aggregators that I could find at that time. Last week Google released a mobile version of their Reader. Here's my take on the latest entrant in mobile feed reading wars.

First of all, the main advantage that web based aggregators have is that they maintain the state of your feed reading experience across devices. If you read something on a web based reader on your PC it won't pop up as unread on the mobile edition of that reader. So what I really want is a reader that has a great mobile version and a great full web version as well. As I wrote here, I'm willing to put up with the glaring defects in Bloglines Mobile simply because the feeds in it are synchronized with the excellent desktop version. So if you don't like Google Reader on the desktop then there isn't much reason to use it on your mobile device. A lot of people like the "big" Google Reader but at least as many hate it.

I think there are several reasons that opinion on Google Reader is so polarized. The main one is that Google Reader uses the "River of News" paradigm - where you see the titles of the latest items from all your feeds mixed together in the order received. Personally, I'm not a fan of the "River...". Certain blogs I like to read first, Russell Beattie was like that until he quit posting. Now my favorites are Michael Mace, Martin Sauter and Carlo and Russell at MobHappy. If one of them has a new item I want to read it first, before the latest press releases on Engadget or some phone review.

Google Reader on the web has a glorious looking UI with lots of Ajax magic. I'm not so sure it's actually as usable an interface as the clunky Bloglines one. Google Reader is also a beta, even on the desktop, and there is missing functionality - no way to mark all the items in a feed or in all feeds as read, for example. I hear people complain about bugs too - one glaring one is that if you unsubscribe from a feed, it doesn't remove that feed's unread items upstream in the "River", you still have to visit them to make them go away.

Incidentally, Google Reader has two defaults that you will probably want to change. I had to change the sorting to "date" - the default sort of "auto" seems to sort items in totally random order. I think it's supposed to sort items with more "authority" higher but it just seems broken to me. You probably also want to set read items as hidden. Note that you can only change these defaults on the desktop - not on the mobile pages.

But enough about Google Reader on the desktop, lets look at the mobile version. The opening screen (top image) shows a list of the 9 most recent items from your feeds. The list is compact with just the item title and the name of the feed. Clicking the title or the numbered access key takes you to the item (2nd image). Unlike Bloglines mobile, Reader puts only one item body on a mobile page. Bloglines sends the full text of all unread items from a given feed to you as a single page. That can be 100's of KB's for a high volume, image-heavy feed - more than most mobile browsers can handle.

You can also read all the items in a particular feed by clicking on the feed name in the list of items. Of course, you might have to go through several screens of items before you find one from any particular feed - but that's the way River of News works. When you go into a feed this way, you again see a compact list (third image) of the first nine titles along with the first sixty characters of each entry.

Mobile usability is pretty good in Reader. Access keys are used extensively. The lists of items all have access keys so you can just hit a single numeric key to go to an item. At the bottom of each item are links to the next un-read item, to the full item and back to the list of all items (bottom image). These links have access keys too.

Images in feed items are displayed full size rather than compressed, which could be a problem with feeds that include big images. All links in feeds are retrieved using the Google transcoder - which does resize images. There is a link to the full item on the originating blog, which also uses the transcoder. Although transcoding is a touchy subject with many bloggers, transcoding the full item does provide a mobile-friendly way to read partial feeds.

I was not able to launch Reader Mobile in my favorite Palm OS browser, Xiino as the pages are sent with the mime-type of application/xhtml+xml which Xiino doesn't support. This is likely to be an issue with other PDA browsers, particularly old ones. Google really needs to do browser detection and only send xhtml to devices that can accept it. Most other browsers including Opera Mini work fine. You can launch Google Reader by going to http://www.google.com/reader/m/ or by just going to google.com on a mobile device and choosing personal home page and then Reader.

In summary, I think that Google Reader Mobile is the best mobile-web based rss reader yet when only the mobile piece is considered. Compared with Bloglines mobile it has a much better UI that won't overload your browser. It doesn't have as big an advantage over Feedlot UI-wise but it does support Atom feeds which Feedalot does not. If you are using Bloglines or Feedalot on the desktop, I don't recommend switching unless you can also live with Google Reader on the desktop.

1-July-2013: Shit down by Google

TamsPalm-the Palm OS Blog is an interesting blog by Palm developer, Tam Hanna. The site is updated several times a day by Tam and a number of contributors and includes Palm OS tips and secrets, product reviews, general musings on the future of the handheld scene and the process of software development along with a number of technical pieces replete with code examples. Tam's the guy who wrote the utility that lets the Netfront browser (which normally only works on Sony Clies) run on Palm branded devices.

Tam is using a Wordpress theme called Lesbar to create the PDA version of the blog. Lesbar strips the blog down to a single column containing just the blog items along with a search box at the top and a form for writing to the "shoutbox" at the bottom. In general, Lesbar does it's job allowing a mobile user to read sequentially through the blog starting with the most recent post. Like CoolSmartPhone, the pages are big - so you need something like a Palm Treo or Opera Mini to fully appreciate the TamsPalm site.

Update: Tamspalm no longer offers the Lesbar theme and worse yet the current theme is terrible for mobile users. The best way to read TamsPalm on your phone is with an RSS reader like Bloglines Mobile.

Diggpad (wampad.com/digg/) is the work of Shawn Mccollum of Wampad. It takes a little different approach to Digg.com than the other mobile Diggs. Wampad is a mobile meta-search site so not surprisingly Diggpad lets you search Digg. Below the search box there are eight links that take you to the latest from Digg's seven topics or "All". Unlike the other mobile Diggs, Diggpad only displays the top nine diggs for the category or query you entered. Nine titles fills up my mobile's screen and exploring nine Dugg sites certainly keeps one busy for a while. Still, It bothers me that I can only see nine Diggs. I'd like to see a more link at the bottom of the screen to bring up the next Diggs. When you on click a headline in Diggpad you go first to a landing page with a fuller description and a link to the dugg site transcoded by Google. Using a landing page adds a click but it lets you scan more titles without scrolling - a good trade off for the small screen. Accesskeys also add usabilitity to Diggpad.

25-Apr-2009 Site is down.

A guide to New York City's Broadway theater scene. Brief plot synopsis, theater addresses, cast list, curtain times and theater phone numbers (not click to call!) .

Parked domain.

A relatively new BlackBerry news blog, user forum and download site. The mobile edition of BlackBerryTrade  doesn't include the blog , only the downloads and forums.  The download selection is pretty limited at the moment with just four applications and 19 themes.  The best part of the BlackBerryTrade is the forums, especially the "BlackBerry Tips and Tricks" section.  It's one of the best collections of  beginner and advanced BlackBerry tips I've seen. There's some great stuff there; like how to use the Storm on AT&T or T-Mobile and an easy way to backup the 3rd party apps on your device.

Parked domain

Lightningradar.mobi shows recent lightning strikes overlaid on a map of Europe.

Now a "Health & Fittness Magazine" with no weather related content.

If you're at the big CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment® show this week in San Diego or just want to keep on top of news from the event, the CTIA has a mobile website at ctiamobileapp.com with:

• Alerts (currently empty)
• Schedule of sessions where you can also vote on yea or nay on each one
• Searchable Directory of exhibitors with booth numbers and clickable contact email addresses and phone numbers.
• CTIA news feeds from WirelessWeek and Unstrung
• @CTIAShow Twitter stream
• Latest posts from the official CTIA Blog

The same information is also available in native application form for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and S60. Download links are on the front page of the mobile site. All versions are by UNITY Mobile Source: @andrewjb44

Site is no longer available.

Yahoo and Google's Olympic sites both popped up on the eve of the games. Yahoo gives most smartphones, touch devices and Opera Mini users a slick tabbed interface with news, schedules, athlete profiles, medal counts and dedicated pages for each of the major Olympic sports. Feature phones get a mostly text version of the site with most of the same information. Source IntoMobile

Dec-2010: Site is gone.

FAST MSearch is a WAP search engine that is not usually available on a public url. FAST prefers to sell their search technology to mobile carriers (I'm not sure which carriers). It is a shame that FAST is not more widely available as it is THE best WAP search engine I have seen. It seems to have a database of WAP sites that is more complete than even Google's and doesn't return the duplicate hits that plague Google's mobile search. It's not perfect however, many searches fail with a compile error on OpenWave 4.n browsers. This link may not be around for long as it appears to have been set up to demo FAST MSearch - possibly to a prospective client. I find these links occasionally and will post them whenever I find them. These demo links usually stay up for two or three weeks. Enjoy it while you can. Update: down 6/17/2005 Update: Back up at a new url 10/01/05 Update: down 2/4/2006

TV Listings for your market including broadcast, cable and satellite. Brief descriptions of each show.  Requires you to "register" with a mobile mobile number and receive and enter an SMS validation code before you can view the TV listings which strikes me as unnecessarily complex and a potential privacy issue..

TV Guide no loger hasa mobile Webapp, only iOS and Android native apps.

Guide to Hotels, Shopping, Entertainment and Travel in hundreds of cities all over the world. Each catergory is sub-divided by price, type, etc. and consists of a simple list of establishments with address, phone number, estimated room price for the hotels and a few word descriptions.

Down as of 2006-08-19

The WAP2 version of Google has four modes:
1) "Web" searches the main Google index for primarily desktop sites. The Web search function has been around for a while and has always allowed you to browse the sites it finds. It used to be that the version of the web site sent to the phone was striped of images, forms and most text formating which is fine for static information sites but no good for any site that requires data entry. Plus, the web without images is pretty dull. All that's changed now, Google now returns the page with images and forms intact. Well, actually forms on secure sites like banking and airline sites come up as read-only but on non-secure sites forms work well.

Google has a neat feature that I haven't seen anywhere else. If Google's transcoding engine finds something that looks like a typical navigation menu (bunch of links without any text between them) it hides the menu and replaces it with a plus sign icon and the first few letters of first menu item. You can see this in the second image. When you click on the plus sign, the menu expands (third image) and the icon changes to a minus sign, allowing you to collapse the menu block. Clearly the idea is to let you focus in the site's content.

The other thing I like about Google is that they understand that you can't send 50KB html pages to a phone. Large sites are broken up into multiple < 10KB pages with Next and Previous links to navigate between them. Most of the other mobile transcoding web to wap sites like IYHY, Phonifier or MobileLeap send you the whole site without any regard to whether you phone's browser can handle that much data (most WAP2 browsers have trouble with anything much over 10KB) or if you can afford to pay for so many bytes.

Unfortunately, the Google's transcoding engine is not so smart about images. No image resizing occurs, so very large images can get sent to the phone with the same issues of capacity and cost. Google allows you hide images but only after you have already loaded the page with the images! For that reason, I prefer AOL's mobile search which does resize images.
2) "Images" searches for and displays small 'thumbnails' of images from the web.
3) "Local" is a mobile version of Google local search with maps.
4) "Mobile Web (Beta)" is simply wonderful. It is the first decent WAP2 search engine which returns mobile links, both wml and xhtml in great quantity and quality.

Update:The Google "Classic" search interface is no more. It was retired in early 2008. There's now only one basic version which is at google.com/m

Site devoted to Nokia's game deck.

Replaced by ovigaming.mobi

Download free games.

8/4/06 The games are gone, replaced by marketing blurbs for a mobile development house.

I don't have any Palm OS devices anymore and hadn't visited MyTreo in quite awhile. I was pleasantly surprised when I dropped by the site yesterday and discovered that they now have mobile versions of everything; the news blog using Alex King's WordPress Mobile Plugin, two mobile versions of the Forum (Regular and Lite) and a mobile version of MyTreo Downloads. The download store is particularly impressive. It's a searchable database of thousands of open source, freeware, shareware and commercial Palm OS and Windows Mobile games and applications. There are screenshots and user reviews for almost all of them. They even have the hard to find, now that Palm has abandoned it, IBM Java run-time needed to use Opera Mini on Palm devices.

Shut down

All the buzz about Opera Mini must be frustrating for the 84 million users on US BREW carriers like Verizon, Alltel, US Cellular, Metro PCS or Cricket. Phones on these networks can't run Java applications like Opera Mini, the amazing free browser that lets you use any website on mainstream phones.

Using a mobile transcoder offers a viable alternative to Opera Mini and works on any data enabled phone that has a browser. Transcoders take big web pages designed for PC browsers and split them up into multiple smaller pages. Images are resized and a lot of extraneous stuff, like most ads, gets striped out. The end result isn't as pretty as browsing with Opera Mini but it does let you get at the content of most websites. About the only thing you can't do with a transcoder is access secure encrypted services like online banking and the checkout at e-merchants.

One of the best mobile transcoders, Skweezer (skweezer.net) released a new version Monday. The update makes a big improvement in Skweezer's ability to adapt pages for specific mobile browsers. For example, when using my Motorola i855, Skweezer used to deliver text-only pages, the new Skweezer includes all the images resized to just fit the browser's 176px width. The second image shows how th PC version of this blog looks in Skweezer. The new release also seems better at reducing bandwidth. Images can still be turned off if you want to further reduce it for speed or cost reasons. You can also adjust paging (page splitting) on a preferences page. Choices are to split at 5, 20 or 50KB or not at all. All the Skweezer pages have been redesigned with a cleaner, simpler look and usability is improved with the addition of accesskeys - numeric short cuts to common functions. Skweezer also offers web search using Ask.com's index.

If you haven't tried Skweezer recently, check it out. It's one of the top three transcoders in my book, the others being Google and Mowser. I still think Google is the best because it has something equivalent to Opera Mini's content folding - emphasizing main content by replacing navigation menus and less important parts of the page with a plus sign which can be clicked to show the hidden elements.

Feb-2013: Skweezer's free service has been shut down

 

Another news gosip site covering cellular networks and phones in the USA. The first pictures of unreleased phones often appear here. They also announce when Sprint has a new firmware upgrade for one of their phones which is something that Sprint itself never publicizes.

7/31/2006: No longer a mobile site

Mobile edition of the Albuquerque Journal daily newspaper. Only the first six or so stories at the top of the main page are readable without a subscription. Clicking on any other link will lead to a mobile-unfriendly sign up page.

Hasn't been updated since 2011

A great Formula One auto racing site. It's an 'exclusive' on the Vodafone network, but fortunately it's a public url so anyone can use it. Content is provided by a major F1 web site, PLANET-F1.com and for the WAP2 edition consists of the full text of the ten most recent stories from the News section of the web site. There is also a WAP1 version which only shows only the top four stories with the stories themselves abbreviated. The stories include interviews with drivers, team owners and directors, post qualifying and post race press conferences, practice, qualifying and race reports, the official press statement that each team usually releases every day during race weekends. In other words just about every thing you can read on the major F1 web sites. The only things missing are pictures and live lap by lap coverage of the races and qualifying. For those - go to the BBC's F1 site.
Update: 23-Feb-2006: The site is down.

The Official FIFA World Cup mobile site, hosted by Yahoo, is attractively designed and makes good use of color and images. Both layout and image size vary depending of which browser the site detects. It's strictly a WAP2 site, there is no official support for wml-only devices. I've put wml links to this site and several other WAP2-only sites on wml.yeswap.com - follow the menu to Sports/World Cup The html to wml conversion is via a little transcoder I wrote. You can also use the Google transcoder to view the official site. Currently on the official site, there's a front page of general news articles, complete schedules of the matches and a page for each team with team roster and team-specific news articles. If you have a Yahoo account, you can login and customize the site by selecting your two favorite teams and two favorite players. If you do the customization thing, the Teams page shows just your two team's schedules and the two player's stats. You can still click an All Teams link to see the default teams page. Other features are a shop where you can buy World Cup themed ringtones, wallpapers and Java Games, a daily poll, a signup screen to receive SMS alerts and another page where you can send a link to the site to your buddies - also by SMS. Best of all ,the site has a (currently disabled) Live link - it looks like they will be providing live coverage of at least some of the matches.

Site is down 09-Dec-2006

Htcfans.com is a news site and forum for users of the Windows Mobile devices made by Taiwan's HTC the company that makes almost all the WM phones and PDA's sold by carriers under their own names like the T-Mobile SDA and Cingular 3125. The Htcfans forum is a Simple Machines Forum so it's mobile friendly. The digg through htcfans.com site (lets just call it DTH) ( d.htcfans.com) is similar to Diggriver showing about 15KB of digg front page headlines and descriptions. (bottom image) The difference is that clicking a headline takes you to the Dugg site through Skweezer's transcoder. There is no landing page - the description is right on the main page under the title/link to the Dugg site. You can see in the screenshot how much more scrolling is required to scan all the Diggs than with Diggpad on a typical phone screen. This is less of a problem on most Windows Mobile devices which have QVGA screens and page-down controls.

Update: 25-Apr-2009 - Site is badly broken. All links lead to the Skweezer.com homepage and excerpts are full of garbage characters and bits ot JavaScript code.

This mobile site features NASA and industry news and press releases plus profiles of aerospace companies.

Gone.

VeloNews.com's 2008 live coverage of Professional Cycling.

Based on the events Velonews covered last year, expect to see live reports from the following events:
Tour of California / Feb 17-24
Tour of Georgia / April 21-27
Giro d'Italia / May 10 - June 1
Tour de France / July 5-27
Vuelta a Espana / August 30 - Sept. 21
World Road Championships / September 27-28
Coverage of European events starts at about 3AM US Eastern Time (GMT -5). Tour of California coverage begins as early as 7AM Eastern Time.

Update 19-Feb-2009 - Velonews live coverage has been mobed to the main Velonews mobile homepage mobile.velonews.com

The official Oscars site at m.oscar.com was created by Netbiscuits for The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and ABC, Inc., the official Oscars broadcaster in the US. It lists all of this year's nominees and promises to have live coverage starting at 8 PM EST on Oscar night. It's not clear if the live coverage will be streaming video or text, but I suspect the later.

While you're waiting for the show to start you can view hundreds of photos of stars on the runway from the last five years of Oscar or read a detailed history of the Academy Awards.

The site also has 35 videos including a multi-part "Road to the Oscars" piece, explanations of the science behind some of the nominees for technical awards and video interviews with nominees, hosts and writers.  Unlike last year, there don't seem to be any trailers from the nominated films.  The videos are served in a variety of formats and should work on any video capable device ranging from basic feature phones to the iPhone. 

You can also sign up on the site for live text alerts featuring news about the nominees, information about special promotions, and live updates throughout the show (standard text messaging rates apply).

Offline

Mobile edition of a bi-weekly print newspaper published in Alexandria, MN. The mobile Echo Press includes local news, sports, weather and classified ads. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Feb-2010: Mobile version is no longer offered.

SprintGurus is an active forum for "Sprint users who "...enjoy tweaking their Sprint phones and account." Currently this is one of the top sources for Palm Pre information and rumors. Mobile browsers are auto detected and served a "lite" vBulletin theme. Some pages may be a little large (up to 100KB) for basic phones.

May 2010: Parked Domain

Mobile version of Gallaghersbeerguide.com. It is a reference and flavor guide to the different styles of beers and lists recommended food and beer pairings.  Also lists alcohol percentage and calories of popular beers. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Parked domain

Mobile edition of American Boat Listings, the largest US "For Sale By Owner", site. Listings are free and ABL charges no commissions to buyer or seller. Search is by zip code and is US only.

Jan-2011: Mobile edition is gone

Blog showcasing outstanding work by students and recent graduates in the fields of design, illustration, photography, fine art, art-direction/copywriting, music, fashion and product design. Mobile view by Mobify

4-Jan-2011 No longer a mobile site

 

WebMD.com is the leading US based health and health care information site based on Comscore's anaultics.  The mobile version of WebMD features a free Symptom Checker iPhone app  along with a drug database, interactive pill identifier and comprehensive First Aid reference, all of which are web based. Provided you have a suppored handset WebMD is an good resource for on the go medical information.

The right handset part is my main annoyance with this site. WebMD's mobile product manager as clearly been sipping the iPhone Kool-Aide a bit much.  Not only is the site's marquee feature a single platform app but the web based features requires JavaScript. There are other cross platform issues too, the site's First Aid and pill identification pages come up blank in the WebKit based Nokia N95 browser.  With Opera Mini and Mobile the site has some minor formatting issues but is at least usable. On the plus side everything, except the iPhone App, does work perfectly and look great in the Android 2.0 browser.

WebMB is the sort of mobile web app that really should work across virtually the entire range of mobile browsers.  Javascript based AJAX is great for improving performance and usability on advanced platforms but it really doesn't take much extra work to provide html-only fallback for more basic browsers.

I'm a little disappointed with WebMD's pill lookup feature too.  It lets you search for pills by size, shape and color but presents results as a just a list of drug names with no images. For a mobile pill identifier, that includes images and works on all devices, take a look at Drugs.mobi. 

Source: Taptu Touch Web Report (PDF)

May-2013: No longer has a mobile wepapp

Posterous, the popular lifestreaming and instant blogging service,has mobile enabled all Posterous blogs using an attractive, one-size-fits-all mobile theme.

Posts include comments, which are displayed on the same page as posts. It doesn't seem possible to leave a comment with the mobile version.

The single-column mobile layout has an average front page size of 38 KB which should work with most phones.  However, the individual posts are not paginated and images are not re-sized so post pages can get quite large. Source: The NextWeb

30-April-2013 - Aquired by Twitter and shut down.

Calling itself a  "Huffington Post for Asia", the Asian Correspondent is collaborative news site aggregating the reporting of thirty-five top news bloggers from thirteen different Asian countries. The site focuses on progressive Asia with an emphasis on green issues, new media, politics and economics. The contributors, who are paid a monthly salary, have been chosen for their relevance, writing quality and local popularity. Sources: Online Journalism Blog, journalism.co.uk

Mobile edition discontinued

Mobile friendly forum for Android users.  The forums are part of the Android Community news and reviews site which doesn't currently have a mobile optimized version.

Android Community Forums have been discontinued and main site still isn't mobile formated or responsive

Before TV and the Web, LIFE Magazine was the biggest thing in mass media.  The large format pictorial news weekly was the best selling magazine in the US with a weekly circulation of over 13.5 million in the 1940's.

LIFE was largely responsible for the development of the craft of photojournalism and published many of the best photographers of the 20th Ccentury including Alfred Eisenstaed, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, W. Eugene Smith and Edward Steichen.

Unable to compete with television, LIFE ceased publication as a weekly in 1972. It resumed several years later as a monthly and published its last issue in 2000.

In 2009, LIFE's parent, Time, Inc., launched LIFE.com as a joint venture with Getty Images. The site draws from the LIFE and Getty photo archives of over 10 million images to create a revolving gallery of some of the best current and historic news photos on the Web. The image archive is also searchable.

LIFE's mobile site is more of the same in a smaller scale., It includes image search and a rotating gallery arranged by topic.  Formatted for a minimum screen width of 320 px and with page sizes up to a megabyte, LIFE Mobile works best with smartphones browsers or Opera Mini on large screened feature phones.

No longer a mobile or responsive site

Enhanced mobile version of Google Reader server by default to Android, bada, iPhone, WebOS and Firefox Mobile browsers. Also works well in Opera Mobile if the URL is specified. It's usable in Opera Mini but slow because expanding items requires a server round trip

1-July-2013: Shit down by Google

A guide to the UK's major attractions and places to visit. Listings include descriptions, photos, address, phone numbers, maps and links to nearby dinning, lodging and transportation listings. Seems like a useful site although the phone numbers in listings are not click to call and the auto-playing audio track on the home page is very annoying.

No longer mobile friendly.

Business News. Navigation poor except on Openwave browsers. The Wall Street Journal has discontinued free public wap access. Available as a paid service using a J2ME application.

Flight Status and schedules
Down: America West merged with US Air and no longer exists.

News, reviews and forums for Palm Treo users. Updated daily.

12-2011, Mobile site is down, desktop site hasn't been updated in 6 months.

Venerable Entertainment Rag. Some stories written in a unique style that may only make sense to industry insiders.

No longer has a mobile or responsive web design version

Bloglines is a great web based aggregator on the desktop. It has a lot of potential as a mobile browser. Unfortunately, Bloglines Mobile has one critical flaw - it lacks an item index page. By index page, I mean the list of items for an individual feed. Index pages provide a drill-down capability that is essential to managing the volume of information in an RSS feed on a small screen. To me, a mainstream phone has a 128x160 pixel screen. Sure, smartphones have at least 176x208 and feature phones like the RAZR are starting to use that size as well. But most Nokias have 128x128 screens and the entry level Nokias are only 96x65. If you want your site to have mass appeal you have to aim at the mass market devices. The first image in the Winksite review shows an example of an index that works on small screens. Feedalot and Bloggo use the same design. Bloglines dispenses with an index page altogether and dumps you into the full text of all of a feed's current entries one after another as one giant page To get to the second entry you have to scroll through the full text of the first entry. That could easily be 15 screenfulls on a 128x160 phone. That's OK if you sequentially read though every post in every feed you subscribe to, but I read far too many feeds for that. I want to be able too scan the entry titles and read the ones that sound interesting and then maybe go back to the titles and read a couple more entries that sound interesting. Blogline's design might works on something like a Treo, Danger Hiptop/Sidekick or Nokia 9300 which has a large screen and dedicated page-down keys. If that's the target device, fine. But those aren't the mainstream phones that predominate today on the mobile web.

In spite of the above criticisms, I use Bloglines every day. Why? In a word - synchronization. I want my mobile reader to only show me items I haven't read already on the desktop and vice versa. Along with a million or two other folks, I use Bloglines on the desktop, it's simply the best aggregator around. As I said above, the problem with Bloglines Mobile is that it shows all the unread items for a feed on a single page. This doesn't work well with commercial feeds like Slashdot or Engadget which have dozens of new items daily. But Bloglines allows you to specify which of your feeds you want to see on your mobile (It's under Edit Subscription on each feed's index frame in desktop Bloglines). I set up Bloglines to just display sites on my mobile that only update every day or two (like most personal blogs). It turns out that these are the sites I tend to really read most of the articles instead of just scanning the titles to see if there's anything interesting. So when I'm on the train I read through all the items posted by a few of my favorite bloggers on my phone. When I'm back at my desktop, I skim through the busy commercial sites.

Note: if you are using the WAP1 version of Bloglines, you need to hit the Refresh link after logging before you can see your feeds. This is not a Bloglines bug, it's a limitation of the YesWAP html to wml transcoder.

Dec-2010: Bloglines was acquired by Merchant Circle who immediately shut down the mobile edition.

I been looking at the various mobile web based email providers. Previous posts covered Gmail Mobile and Microsoft's new Live Mail Mobile. Today it's Yahoo's turn.

Yahoo has had mobile email since 2000. The current version has been around for at least a couple of years but it's a good design and is aging well. There are both WAP2 and WAP1 versions of Yahoo Mail. The interfaces of the two versions are almost identical. The screenshots show the WAP2 version. The only difference I've found between the two, is that you can add the sender of an email to your address book with a single click on WAP2 but not on WAP1.

The Yahoo mobile mail interface is simple and intuitive. The first time you connect to mobile mail you will have to login. Yahoo saves a cookie on your device so future logins will be automatic . You can also log out if you concerned about security should you phone fall into the wrong hands.
After you log in, the initial screen lists your mail folders showing the number of unread messages in each. Numeric access keys (which are used throughout Yahoo mail) make selecting a folder a single click operation. In the list of messages only the message title is shown. This a trade off, by not showing the sender's name more of the title can be shown. It would be nice if you could choose between displaying sender, title or both in the list but that option is not available.

Once you open a message, the sender's name, title, time and date is displayed above the message body. WAP2 users can click the sender's name to add the sender to their address book. This is handy but there is no obvious way to get back to the message from the address book other than the browser's "Back" key. The "Options" link lets you reply, forward, delete, move the item to a folder or view headers. The "View Headers" option is unusual in a mobile mail app and shows the reply-to field, other recipients and the full sender address.

At the bottom of every screen in the Mail application is a menu (last image) which allows you to compose a new message, create folders and check other POP mail accounts (which must be set up in advance on the desktop). Composing a message is straight forward - pick recipients from the address book, key a title and body and hit "Send"

While there's nothing flashy about the Yahoo Mail mobile UI, it is efficient. The underlying Yahoo Mail feature set is one the best of all the web-based mobile mail services. Unique to Yahoo is Free Intellisync software to keep your Yahoo address book in sync with Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Organizer, ACT! and Palm and Microsoft PDA's. The software can also sync most of these applications with your Yahoo Calendar and NotePad. You can make phone calls or emails directly from the address book on your phone which makes the synchronized Yahoo address book particularly useful if your phone can't synchronize with the desktop or if you have hard time keeping your contacts up to date across multiple phones.

You can also set up Yahoo Mail to pull mail into your Yahoo inbox from external POP servers. SSL connections to POP servers aren't supported so this won't work with Gmail.

I really like Yahoo's mobile alerts. An alert is a SMS sent to your phone when new email arrives. You can set filters to only send SMS's for emails meeting certain criteria - such as a specific word in one or more of the fields; sender, to, subject or body. Hotmail and Live Mail Mobile also have mobile alerts that work similarly. Gmail doesn't but you can get the equivalent functionality by setting up your mail to be forwarded (unconditionally or based on a filter) to your phones email-SMS gateway address AND also selecting the option to keep a copy of the mail in your inbox. I find that mobile email alerts give me an almost Blackberry like email experience on even the most basic phones. The SMS is my "You have new mail!" indicator - telling me to go into mail on my phone's browser and read the new message. It's really pretty cool. I do have free incoming SMS, if you have pay for SMS and get much mail you will want to use filters so you only get alerted for the really important emails.

Yahoo, Live Mail and Gmail are all good mobile email services. Yahoo stands out for it's desktop address book synchronization and the access to email on POP servers, Gmail for it's awesome speed, huge email storage limit and the ability to view many attachments on the mobile and Live Mail has a fresh and powerful new UI. To me the most important feature of a mobile web site is it's speed and Gmail is the speed champ by a wide margin which is why it's my top pick.

Update 16-Sep-2007: This describes an old version of Yahoo Mail which no longer exists.

SeatGuru.com now has a mobile site. Thanks to Kevin Tofel at James Kendrick's jkOnTheRun.com for discovering this site and sharing it.

SeatGuru, which has been on the full web for five years, tells travelers something they never know enough about until too late - airline seats. The site has tables comparing seat width and pitch and in-flight amenities for all the aircraft types in the fleets of 29 airlines. The best part of SeatGuru are the detailed seating charts which show the locations of power ports, restrooms and galley and give each seat a color-code; white for a typical seat, green for a particularly good seat - usually one with extra log room, yellow for a not so good seat that doesn't recline fully or is near a restroom and red for a truly bad seat which usually means one with multiple problems.

Mobile SeatGuru has the same color coded seating charts as the full site. It's easy to navigate: first pick your airline and then choose the aircraft from a list. A typical seat map page is about 1 KB of markup and 25 KB of images which just about any WAP2 browser should be able to handle. The charts themselves are 200 px wide. The site works well on QVGA devices or any browser that can resize images to screen width, like recent versions of the Openwave browser and Opera Mini. Even on the 176 px screen of the Motorola RAZR which doesn't resize images or support horizontal scrolling you can still see all the relevant information as the 24 pixels that are cut off are just white space and the right-hand border. If the images are to wide to display properly on your phone, the Google Transcoder does a great job with this site.

Emulator images courtesy Openwave Systems Inc. Openwave and the Openwave logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of Openwave Systems Inc. in various jurisdictions. All rights reserved.

SeatGuru no longer has a mobile friendly Webapp, only iPhone and Android native apps.

SociallyGiven.com has posted a piece titled 7 Versions of 'Digg Mobile' Compared which is a nice wrap up with screenshots of some of the current mobile Diggs - including five I hadn't seen before. The nicest of the new crop seems to be Original Signal, Transmitting Digg, digg.originalsignal.com/mobile which shows a reasonable 10 headlines per screen with the links to the Diggs going through Google's transcoding proxy. Unlike the most of other new Mobile Diggs, this one has small enough page sizes to will work well on any mobile.

Aug-2012: redirects to apple.originalsignal.com/mobile

GameJump is a mobile (wap.gamejump.com) and web site (GameJump.com) offering free downloadable ad-supported Java games. The site and service seems to be a raging success with 1.4 million downloads in it's first four months of operation. There are currently over 350 games available on GameJump. This success has not gone unnoticed with Greystripe, the company behind GameJump, winning Best in Show Overall at the Under the Radar Mobility Conference. In a comment to this MobileCrunch post, Andy Choi, Greystripe CTO, claims impressive 5-15% click through rates. Greystripe has also released some metrics where they report that the service is most popular in the US, UK, India, South Africa and Indonesia. It's pretty amazing that they can get that many off-portal downloads, particularly from US users who are notoriously reluctant leave the carrier deck. Also telling is the carrier breakdown with the largest US carrier, Cingular's 39% share barely beating much smaller T-Mobile's 30%. Could that be because T-Mobile charges $6/month for unlimited data compared with Cingular's $20. Yes, cheap unlimited data does drive mobile data adoption.

I gave the service a try and liked what I saw. First I downloaded a couple of games to my old Nokia 3650 from GameJump's mobile site. There is no registration required, you don't have to give GameJump any personal information, especially not your phone number so there are no worries about Text SPAM or premium SMS scams. The whole process was very smooth. GameJump correctly identified my phone but also allowed me to override and pick a device from a list if that was "Not my phone". Both downloaded games looked and worked well with attractive full screen graphics and good game play. When I launched the games there was a message to the effect that the game would occasionally use the phone's data connection to download new ads and I had to agree to allow this before I could start playing. I have an unlimited data plan so I was fine with this but I do appreciate the disclosure.

Next I downloaded a game from GameJump's Web Portal for side loading onto my Boost Mobile Motorola i855. I was pleased to see that GameJump lists games for all the Java capable iDEN phones all the way back to the i85. Unlike some sites, GameJump has both the .jar and the .jar files available for download, both of which are required by iDEN handsets. The game I downloaded for the i855 installed with no issues and again looked and played well. As with the mobile site, no registration is required to download games. You can register, all that's required is an e-mail address. Registration lets you review games and participate in GameJump's contests where you can win free phones.

You have probably never heard of most of the games on GameJump but the ones I downloaded were of commercial quality - much better than what you typically find on freeware game sites like GetJar.com and Midlet.org. GameJump has games in many genres like sports, action, adventure, casino, puzzle and retro. I'm not much of a gamer but I do like puzzle games and downloaded three, a well done version of the classic Same Game, BubbleTrouble which combines elements of Bejeweled and Same Game and Magic Crystals - a Tetris variant with particularly nice graphics. All three were easy to play, fun "casual" games with no run learning curve - ideal for killing a few minutes while waiting for a bus ,- .

About those ads, I was pleasantly surprised that the ads are not at all intrusive. GameJump says that they only display ads when you start or quit a game so as not to disrupt the playing experience. In over an hour of playing the three games I downloaded I only saw one ad. When I quit Same Game an ad appeared offering a $5.00 off coupon for an oil change if I entered an e-mail address. The option to decline was a little hard to find (in a menu linked to the left soft key) but it was there and choosing it ended the game with no nagging. Overall, I was quite pleased with the GameJump experience. I think these guys will do well.

More on GameJump from:

• GamesetWatch
• Mobile Marketing Magazine

20-Jun-2011 Gamejump is out of business.

The Weather Channel's mobile site (xhtml.weather.com) has traffic maps for most US metropolitan areas. A traffic link appears below the current weather conditions if there's traffic information available for the area. The maps are resized to between 100 and 300px wide to fit the screen width of the phone you are using.

I think combining traffic and weather makes sense for mobile. The weather has a big impact on traffic and checking both before you go somewhere is a good idea.

The Weather channel, which aquired Beat The Traffic in 2011, no longer shows traffic information on weather.com

Live Theater industry news magazine with industry news, reviews and listings of casting calls.

Backstage.com no longer has a mobile formatted or responsive site

Windows Live Search Driving Directions. A very nice implementation of driving directions which remembers your most recent entries and offers you the option of viewing overview or turn by turn zoomable and scrollable maps with traffic overlays. There is a nice hybrid map option which combines aerial photos with street and highway overlays.

I really like the mobile versions of maps from Microsoft's MapPoint division which are very attractive and detailed and I think easier to read than most of the competitions.

Bing (formery Live) no longer offers mobile driving directions

I've criticized CNN in the past for their policy of blocking users whose carrier is not a CNN "partner" or if they are using Opera Mini. It looks like that may be changing. CNN together with Ericsson have launched cnnmobile.com, a slick new mobile news site targeted at users in the NEMA (Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America) markets but seemingly accessible from any IP address.

Like the still restricted by IP address CNN US mobile site at mobile.cnn.com, cnnmobile.com has much more than just news. There are 5-day weather forecasts for over 1000 cities around the world, plus sports, entertainment, technology and business news. Also exciting is the inclusion of hourly two minute video news reports. The non-streaming 3gp videos run around 600 KB and should play on most recent phones.

The site design is good with lots of access keys and 44px wide thumbnail images that expand to full screen width when clicked. There's even a text-only wml version of the site for users with old or entry level phones that can't display xhtml

I really like the new CNN International site and not only because I can browse it with my preferred browser instead of my phone's slow and clumsy built-in browser. The coverage seems more balanced and less sensationalist than the US version. For example, one of the lead stories in the US edition is headlined "'State of panic' after car bombing" while the international edition's version of the same story carries the less subjective, more factual title "Baghdad car bomb kills 10".

CNN is also encouraging users to submit videos and pictures of breaking news from their mobile device by MMS or email to [email protected]. This user generated content will be featured in a special i-Report area on the mobile site.

Sports is one area where US users might find the international edition slightly inadequate. While boxing and tennis seem to get equal coverage in both the NEMA and US markets, basketball does not. On the eve of March Madness (US college basketball championships) there is nary a hoops story in CNN International. But that's what ESPN is for.

Update: CNN no longer has separate URLs for its US and International editions. Use m.cnn.com

This popular blog covering the Boston Red Sox MLB team detects mobile browsers and delivers a mobile formatted edition to them.

Apr-2010 Site has lost its mobile edition and morphed into BleacherCreaters.tv

My first experience with the web on a handheld device was 7 years ago on a Palm PDA using Avantgo. The company provided PC software that downloaded "channels" to the PDA when ever you synchronized. Later I read the channels offline during my commute. Avantgo had hundreds of channels which were really simple html based mobile web sites. Avantgo is still around using the same basic business model. except that the Avantgo device software now offers the option of downloading channels over the air on connected devices. I just discovered that Avantgo also has a mobile web client. It showed up as one of the default sponsored bookmarks in Opera Mini 4.0. Avantgo is normally a subscription service but the link in Opera Mini lets you sample 7 feeds including Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone is an Avantgo exclusive, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere else on the mobile web. The Avantgo Opera Mini site works pretty well on on other mobile browsers besides Opera Mini. You can register for Avantgo on the mobile or from your PC to get access to all of Avantgo's approximately 1000 channels.

Avantgo shut down in 2009.

rsWAP (gatebot.com/rswap/) - Free ring tones for Sprint phones. When downloading ringtones and images on Sprint, which is a US CDMA operator, the phone looks for a .GCD (General content descriptor) file which is just a specially formatted text file containing information like the size, title and url of the actual audio or image file. Most generic content download sites don't provide .GCD files so the downloads fail on Sprint phones. rsWAP has a large selection of tones and wallpapers complete with the necessary .GCD files. These downloads will only work on Sprint phones.

13-Apr-2011 No longer exists.

Wine reviews and opinion in blog format. Mobile edition uses Andy Moore's WordPress plugin.

12-Jan-2008 Wine Weekly no longer offers a mobile edition

InfoGin (m.infogin.com) is the company that provides transcoder technology to AOL and Yahoo and several mobile opperators. I never use transcoders anymore, Opera Mini so much better than any of them. But if your stuck on Verizon with just that Openwave browser, a good transcoder can really open up the web for you.

I found AOL's transcoder increasingly unreliable when I was using it. The thing seemed to return an error rather than a page more often then not. Perhaps the errors were the fault of AOL's infrastructure rather than the core technology. Anyway, in my brief tests InfoGin performed well. All the pages I tried loaded quickly and web forms seem functional, I was able to post a comment on this site.

InfoGin has what I consider the two essential features in a transcoder, pages spliting and image resizing. There's also a primitive form of Opera and the Google Transcoder's content folding were menus and forms are hidden but can still be reached through a navigation menu.

One great feature of InfoGin that I haven't seen before in a transcoder is the Map function ...

More...

Down: 8-Oct-2008

GrandCentral (grandcentral.com/mobile) Google owned free call forwarding and voicemail service. I'm not going to describe the GrandCentral service in detail as it's been covered by thousands of articles and posts. Essentially it gives you a new phone number which you can set to ring any or all of up to 6 mobile, landline or Gizmo Project SIP numbers. There are loads of other features like call blocking and screening, custom voicemail greetings and temporary call diversion. GrandCentral's mobile web site gives you complete control over your GrandCentral number, you can change which phones your GrandCentral number rings, temporarily block calls or divert them to a new number, view call records, listen to voicemail by downloading an mp3 and manage and place calls from your GrandCentral phone book. The service has been in closed beta for what seems like forever but invites are pretty easy to get. In Fact I have 10 invites to give out. If you would like one just leave a comment.

Redirects to its successor, Google Talk.

The Money Channel which produces Steve Crowley's American Scene financial news and opinions show on Business Talk radio network and WallStreetCast on Bravo TV has added a mobile web site to their creative portfolio. The Money Chanel appears as the Finance section on mobile web portal AskMeNow and consists of 10 financial news items from Reuters and a ticker search that returns stock quotes and company specific financial wire items.

2-Dec-2008: Site is down.

The mobile edition of Mmegi, the only independent daily newspaper in the African Repubic of Botswana. The site offers a nice mix of content including a half a dozen or so full stories from each of the paper's News, Sports, Editorials, Letters, Book Reviews, Business and Art/Culture sections. Most stories are illustrated with a news photo.; The mobile site even has a link to the paper's RSS feed, something more mobile sites should now that a number of mobile phones as well as Opera Mini have built in RSS readers.  Mmegi Mobile labels itself as a "test" site but it seems to be fully functional other than a broken link to the Comics section.  At 30KB the site might be a little large for some mobile browsers as reflected by its 3 out of 5 dev.mobi score.

27-Aug-2012: Mmegi no longer has a mobile or responsive site

Cloquet, Minnesota's Pine Journal's mobile site carries local news, sports, weather and classifieds. 

Feb-2010: Mobile version is no longer offered.

Follow the 39,000 mile, nine month long round the world yacht race on your phone. The current Volvo Ocean Race started in October, 2008.  The race's official mobile site has news and videos from the race and a chart graphic displaying the current position of each competitor.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Jan-2011: Mobile edition is gone

Feb 2011 - Hotel booking is no longer available with KeyToss

I've been pretty dissatisfied with most of the mobile hotel search and booking sites I've tried. I don't know what it is about this category but hotel sites always seem to have serious usability problems; unnecessarily complex search forms, illogically sorted results, listings for hotels that turn out to have no availability, "bait and switch" pricing or prices buried several levels deep making comparison shopping unnecessarily complex.

This week Keytoss launched a new mobile hotel booking service at h.keytoss.com. I've covered KeyToss before. It's a personalized mobile homepage similar to iGoogle or NetVibes. I like KeyToss, it's feature rich and enables adding a lot more types of content than the rather limited mobile versions of iGoogle and NetVibes. According to Keytoss their hotel site is "...the Most Advanced Hotel Booking Service on the Mobile Web". That's a bold claim and I approached the site skeptically but with high hopes.

KeyToss is location enabled as much as is possible with current technology. It tries to use geolocation to find you so you don't have to enter your location. Keytoss can geolocate on Android and Windows Mobile phones using Google's Gears, BlackBerry's with the BlackBerry browser's built in location support and on the iPhone with the help of Alocola, a free open source app.

Even without geoloacation it's pretty easy to use KeyToss. The search form has only one required field, your location. If it hasn't been prepopulated by geolocation it will accept your free form entry of a neighborhood, address, landmark, city, airport code, postal code or geo-coordinates. The rest of the search form is prepopulated with logical defaults; one room for tonight, rated at least two stars, under $250, for one person, for one night. All of those can of course be changed.

The results seem to be mostly sorted by price, from lowest to highest. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the sort to distance from your location, which given Keytoss' geolocation ability, would be a great feature for trying to find a room at the last minute in an unfamiliar city.

The listings include only available rooms with the lowest available base price for each hotel shown right in the initial listing along with a link to a map. Clicking on a particular hotel in the list of results will give the bottom line price, including taxes and fees, and considerable detail on each property; amenities, available services and pet and cancellation policies. KeyToss iteself does not have a cancellation charge but individual hotels often do.

Keytoss gets its inventory from Hotels.com and seems to have a huge number of properties available. A search for a room for tonight under $100 (which is considered very cheap) in downtown San Francisco returned 85 results including a $99 deal at a well located four star hotel!

By default, Keytoss lists up to 100 results on a single page. These pages are large, about 200 KB when images are included. That''s fine for the iPhone, Opera Mini or even the BlackBerry, but is obviously too large for most feature phones. To deal with this and make the site work on all phones, Keytoss provides an option to paginate the results, 15 to a page, and another to disable images. Pagination reduces page size to about 40 KB and turning off images drops it to 9 KB. With both options I was able to use KeyToss Hotels on an old RAZR with Motorola's MIB browser and a couple low end Verizon LG phones running Openwave 6.2.3. However the Openwave 7.0 browsers of two Sprint/Nextel iDen Motorola phones claimed that even the 9 KB version of KeyToss was "Too large for available memory". Which is surprising as the same phones could load other pages as large as 30 KB. Which looks like an Openwave bug as Keytoss seems to be doing everything right here.

Booking a room with KeyToss is pretty easy too. If you have set up a profile with KeyToss in advance and included your credit card details you can book with just a click or two after signing in. If you haven't registered there's a click to call option. A discount code in each listing presumably insures that you will get the advertised price even if booking by phone. Finally you can book the old fashioned, non-mobile friendly way by filling out a typical 13 field form with name, address, phone number, card number, expiration date, security code, etc..

All in all, I think KeyToss lives up to it's claim as being the most advanced mobile hotel booking site. It's not perfect, I'd like to see it make better use of geolocation to identify the nearest hotels with vacancies and also use browser detection and adaptation to automatically deliver compatible results to all browsers. But the combination of a large inventory, ease of use and a format that encourages comparison shopping put it well ahead of the current competition.

Ricky Cadden, the Symbian Guru, has expanded his coverage to include Nokia's newest smartphone platform with the launch of Maemo-Guru.com. Of course Maemo itself isn't new having been used in the Nokia N770, N800 and N810 Internet tablets.  But those were not phones. The next iteration of Maemo devices, the N900, is. With its 3.5 inch touchscren, WiFi AND 3G radios, slide out QWERY keyboard, huge amount of memory and a Mozilla based browser with Flash support N900 is positioned as Nokia's flagship handset.

Ricky is no stranger to Maemo, having previously published Tablet-Guru which he shut down after about a year citing Nokia's apparent lack of enthusiasm for the platform.  The N900 changes everything and it seems like a great time to bring back Tablet-Guru, complete with an updated name reflecting that Maemo is not just for tablets anymore.

The N900 is an exciting device and I'm looking on getting my hands on one, especially as it supports my operator of choice, T-Mobile USA's, oddball 3G bands.  Nokia's first Maemo smartphone is going to be a hot topic in the coming weeks and months.  I'm counting on  Ricky and Maemo-Guru editor Rita El Khoury (dotsisx) to give us some first hand impressions of the N900 hardware and software.

The mobile edition of Maemo-Guru is created using WordPress Mobile Pack which does a great job of making the site usable with any mobile browser.

Shut down, redirects to SymbianGuru.com

Read breaking news and rummors about unreleased BlackBerry handsets, software and services.

Parked domain

An attractive "Middle Web " Twitter front end. Has an average page size of 350 KB and a dependency on JavaScript. Halo4 looks and works great in the iPhone, Android, Web OS, and Maemo browsers or Opera Mini or Mobile on a phone with a page width of 320 px or greater.

17-Jun-2013: Shut down, details .

Mobile Chinese-English-Chinese dictionary.  Supports entry of English words and phrases, Chinese characters or Pinyin (phonetic representation of Chinese using Roman characters). Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Parked domain.

Pinstack, one of the oldest (founded 2004) and largest (over 300,000 registered members) BlackBerry user forums has changed it's focus.  Sometime in the last year or so the site gained Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Palm and other smartphone sub-forums and changed it's byline from "Where BlackBerry professionals Connect!" to "Smartphone Professionals Alliance!".

PinStack has always been a very active and well run forum with many knowledgeable and active users, so as someone who is interested in all mobile platforms I welcome the diversification.  Still the majority of activity is in the BlackBerry forums and I think that PinStack will always be thought of first and foremost as a BlackBerry site.

The mobile versions of PinStack's news blog (pinstack.com) and forums (forums.pinstack.com) were redesigned last year. There are no mobile specific URLs, browser detection and redirection are used to route  visitors to the appropriate version. The new look reminds me of the iPhone optimized WPTouch Wordpress plugin but PinStack is a vBulletin site rather than WordPress.. At any rate the site looks good in full web mobile browsers from Opera Mini to the iPhone.  Page size (the pinstack.com mobile homepage is over 300 KB) will probably make the site a non-starter on dumbphones but that's not the target audience. The mobile pages are not at all "dumbed down" and contain the full content and functionality of their desktop equivalents including posting to the forums and marking posts as "trusted".

I did notice a small but annoying usability glitch with PinStack Mobile. The PinStack homepage and the forums aren't very well connected. At least I couldn't find a link from the forums to the homepage. Most of the items on the homepage point to forum threads but once you start navigating around the forums the only way back to the homepage seems to be by pressing the back button repetitively. And if you start at forums.pinstack.com there's no way to get to homepage at all. It's a minor thing but definitely makes navigation harder. All that's really needed is for clicking the PinStack logo at the top of Forum pages to take you back to pinstack.com rather than the top level of the forums as it does now.

May 2010 - Pinstack has replaced their mobile web edition with a downloadable reader app.

 

 

Fashion news blog covering trends, designers, the fashion industry and fashion retail trade.  Good photo coverage of major designer's runway shows. Source: Oh! Mobile directory

Au Mode no longer has a mobile site

White Pages, Yellow Pages and Reverse Phone directory. This site used to be the best mobile people search but lately it has become very slow and often fails to find listed numbers. Use Whitepages.com or SuperPages instead.

8-Sept-2009 Redirects to non-mobile InfoSpace homepage

Broken - never finds any ATM's

Find the nearest ATM (any bank). Shut down some time before 3/26/2006. Use Go2 directory to find ATMs.

An open source  "Touch Web" version of Digg, created by the Digg folks to demonstrate their API.  No JavaScript dependencies but it's not for feature phones due to front page size of over 200 kb and links to Dugg items that open non-mobile pages,

Dec 2010 - Shut down.

A PDA portal hosted by Handspring (I don't know how long this one will be around now that Handspring is part of PalmOne) It's gone as on 1/22/06

Ringtone and wallpaper downloads. No longer a mobile tech site

Dead 12/4-12/11

Timely coverage of professional cycling with an emphasis on American riders.

Update: 16-Sep-2007 Yahoo seems to have dropped Cycling from their mobile web sports coverage

Guide to hotels, events, nightlife and restaurants primarily in the USA and Mexico. Also covers Berlin, London. Descriptions are brief.

Down as of 2006-08-19

Download games, ringtones an wallpapers Site has been shut down.

Occasionally controversial, always interesting MS Smartphone news site. Updated several times a day.

Jan-2010: Gone main domain redirects to WMPoweuser.com

Active mobile users forums. Forums for each major phone manufacturer, smartphones, buy-sell, software and several others. Your phone or PDA must support cookies or the site will revert to the desktop edition as soon as you go to a new page.

Jun-2011: GSMArena no longer has a Forum or a mobile site of any kind!

Update: 4-Sep-2006: Bloggo seems to be down for good - too bad, it had the best UI of any mobile aggregator.
Bloggo is strictly an RSS reader. To me it would be the ideal mobile RSS Aggregator except for one thing - it's just too sloooow. How slow? On a PC with a fast DSL connection - it takes 90 seconds from the time I click the bookmark until the first text appears on my screen. That's with only three feeds, the more feeds you have the longer it takes. Admittedly, it doesn't take much longer on a phone - but my phone's browser times out after 30 seconds so I could never get connected to Bloggo until I discovered a work-around. If, after Bloggo times out, I wait or even go browse another site for two to three minutes and then go back to Bloggo, I get right in. Apparently even after I get the timeout error, Bloggo continues to download and cache my feeds. I don't wait too long however, after about five minutes Bloggo seems to expire the cache and I have to start all over again. It's it worth the wait? Probably not, but if you try it you will see an absolutely perfect mobile UI. The feed list shows you how many unread items you have in each feed and even sorts the list so that feeds with no unread items fall at the bottom of the list! The item index for each feed lists only titles - as is appropriate for a service targeted at phones. When you read a item you get the full item. The only faults other than the performance are that images are not resized and long items aren't broken into pages - both of which can be a problem on phones with page size or image limits. You can get around this by reading Bloggo through a transcoding site like AOL's which resizes images and paginates content.

Mobile edition of the bi-weekly Forbes business and financial magazine. Articles contain the full text content from the magazines web site.

Down 31-May-3007 No Content!

This news and review site is a companion site to PocketPC Thoughts . The site is updated frequently and is one of the very few mobile sites to do in-depth reviews of new phones -although these are generally limited to devices running the Microsoft Smartphone OS. Everything is on one long scrolling page which isn't ideal for phones but is manageable. Some links (including the one to the "Forums" and most of those in the "links" section point to the full web versions of articles.

Redirects to Windows Phone Thoughts which is no longer updated.

The official Ovi Blog now has a mobile version created with WordPress Mobile Pack. The site has tips and tricks for using Ovi services, product release announcements, polls and contests to win free stuff. The current contest is for a trip to Nokia World in London. including accommodations and airfare from anywhere in the world!

Apr-2012 - Redirects to the non-mobile Ovi Maps Blog.

Eugenia, the developer responsible for the awesome OSNews mobile site has created a mobile front end to Digg! The site presents the current top 40 on Digg in a compact format that displays nicely on any WAP2 phone.

The only thing I'm not fond of about this Digg mobile is that when you click through from the mobile page you are on the non-Mobile Digg item page which causes my phones built-in Openwave 7 browser to throw an out of memory error. If you plan on actually following the links to Digg and possibly on to the Dugg site you will need more than the average mobile browser.

I though I could just do a mashup of Mobile Digg and a transcoder like Skweezer. I tried running Digg Mobile though both Skweezer and the Google transcoder (www.google.com/gwt/n) and they both made following links on Digg Mobile possible in the built-in browser without errors. The Digg pages were pretty easy to navigate through either transcoder. I wasn't able to actually Digg or comment, however. Same with Opera Mini. It looks like the transcoders can't deal with all the Javascript that Digg uses.

It sure would be nice to have fully functional mobile Digg. Ideally it would be just for digging sites on the mobile web. You would need a way to digg a new site right from the phone. That's a problem as I don't think any mobile browsers support true bookmarklets. Very few even allow cutting and pasting urls. I'd like to see something like WapTags where you search and browse through a proxy that has a link at the bottom of each screen that does a Digg. Eugenia, are you up to building something like that?

04-25-2009 Site is Down.

Digg's first mobile site, the bare bones Dig River. a read only listing of the top Diggs.

Dec 2010 - Site is down

Alternate text-only CNN site built by mDog.com from CNN's RSS feed

7-Jul-2008: Runtime error

Mobile edition of the famous gadget blog - from FeedM8. Small page and image sizes that should work on any phone.

FeedM8 is down

Cincinnati, Ohio news portal. Links to five local news sources, Dailies The Enquirer and The Post, TV Channel 9 WCPO, Suburban weeklies Community Press and Recorder and event calendar CiN Weekly.

Shut down.

The Google Mobile Olympics site (google.com/m/summergames). The front page presents a list of sports, clicking a link takes you to a schedule of upcoming events and links to news items on the sport from around the web. According to the Google Mobile Blog, results and medal counts will appear as soon as there is something to report. Also from Google, check out the Google logo celebrating the Olympics on the G's mobile search page. Google says this is the first time mobile search has featured a custom logo.

Down - 17-Oct-2008.

Twitter for WAP" lets you follow what people are saying on Twitter using the mobile web instead of SMS. Test drive it with prolific bloggers/twitterers Steve Rubel, Dave Winer and Scoble m.30boxes.com/twapper/steverubel+scobleizer+davewiner

25-May-2013: Broken, displays no tweets.

TapTap (m.taptap.net/) is from AdMob. I linked to in Found on the Mobile Web #18. It's Digg-like in that visitors submit mobile sites and Tap (Digg) the sites they like. TapTap can also be used as a portal, searching and browsing sites by category like Sports, Ringtones, News or Local. Registration is not required to submit or Tap sites however the submission process appears to be moderated. I submitted Yeswap.com several days ago but it hasn't shown up in TapTap yet.

The TapTap front page lists the "hottest" sites with the number of taps each has received. I don't understand how hotness is determined. I'd expect it to be based on the number of taps but it's clearly not - there are sites with only a few taps on the front page and others with thousands buried of back pages. Speaking of buried, TapTap has no equivalent of Digg's bury. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Burying is such a negative concept yet it's what gives users a way to deal with SPAM and excessive self promotion of sites by their owners.

Although it's not required, registration is worthwhile because it gives you a MyTapTap page which is a directory of the sites you've tapped and submitted. Registered users can also use TapTap's notes feature. You can create a note on TapTap's PC web site at www.taptap.net and it shows up in the My Profile > My Notes section on the mobile site. The notes would be more useful if the were also editable on the mobile site though.

TapTap is an interesting site but AdMob doesn't seem to be doing much to promote it. I like the openness (anyone can tap) but fear this is easily exploitable using bots, TapBots if you will, to drive spam and scam sites to the top of the rankings. There's no way to bury a malicious site or to report spam. The moderation seems to be working though as I haven't see any SPAM on TapTap.

June-2010: redirects to AdMob homepage.

FlightAware's a real-time flight tracking site with very detailed information including maps. FlightAware tracks both commercial and private flights as long as a flight plan exists and the owner of a private plane has not requested that tracking be blocked. Tracking is limited to US airspace.

The mobile version keeps the basic layout and content of the FlightAware PC site but removes the ads and resizes maps to 180 px wide instead of 400. The resulting pages work well on SmartPhone browsers and Opera Mini but are too big, up to 70KB, for the built in browsers of feature phones. Usability could be better too, in particular, some links are a hard to read blue on a blue background in the mobile version. The same links in the full version are white on blue - much better. Still, if this site works on your phone, it gives an awesome amount of detail including detailed listings of aircraft features and equipment, forums and even features on interest to pilots like runway diagrams and an IFR Route Analyzer.

Update 6-Mar-2009: Flightaware no longer offers a mobile version. Too bad, it was a useful service.

Maxim magazine's mobile site. Features include jokes, dating advice, gadget and car reviews and lots of pictures of young women in bikinis. There are also videos to purchase.

No longer mobile formatted

There's a public beta of the next version of Bloglines Mobile up at m.beta.bloglines.com . If you are Bloglines user give it a try.

 

I'm really excited about this. I live in the Opera Mini browser running Bloglines Mobile. If there is a new version of either Opera or Bloglines I'm like a kid in a candy store.

While Opera Mini gets updated often, Bloglines hasn't had a significant upgrade in years. Although I use it more than any other mobile site, there are a couple of annoying "features" that I have high hopes of finally seeing changed in the new version.

In fact, the more serious of the two is already fixed in this first beta. More...

Dec-2010: Bloglines was acquired by Merchant Circle who immediately shut down the mobile edition.

Taptu is a new mobile search engine specializing in music search (songs, lyrics, artists, video and audio clips). Their tagline is "A new kind of search engine for mobile phones which allows you to search and find really useful content in 10 clicks or less".

I had excellent results searching for relatively obscure artists. I tried a searching for half a dozen lesser know musicians spanning the last 50 years (Wynonie Harris, Harvey Scales, Tracy Nelson, Deanna Bogart, The Parrots and The 88) and Taptu found all of them except The Parrots, a new Japanese Beatles cover band. The results typically include MP3 music and 3gpp video clips, photos and if they exist; the artists homepage, MySpace page, Wikipedia entry and album cover art. Image thumbnails are featured right on the results page and each result is labeled as song, video. etc. which helps if you are looking for a particular kind of content. Taptu has really got pop music search down. I can't think of an other service on the web, let alone the mobile web, that does such consistently good job of finding content by and about musical artists. More...

Aug 2011: Taptu is now an iOS and Android native app only, the Taptu mobile webapp is gone

Talkster is a VOIP based service that lets you make "free" ad supported phone calls between 22 countries (North America, most of Europe, plus Hong Kong and Israel) using any phone - mobile or landline. The ads are about 10 seconds long and are heard by both parties.

Talkster doesn't charge anything for the service but the calls aren't really completely free. You're making a mobile or landline call to a local Talkster access point. If you are using free night and weekend minutes or an unlimited landline then Talkster calls really are free. But even if you have to pay for the local call, Talkster will be much cheaper than a normal international call.

Using Talkster is a bit complicated. Say you want to call your friend in Spain. You go to the Talkster mobile or PC web site and enter your number and the number you want to call, Talkster texts you a new permanent local number that connects with your friend and also texts your friend a local number that connects to you.

More...

Aug-2011: Talkset no longer has a mobile site and has abandoned their voice calling service

Do you have an ATT Tilt Windows Mobile Phone? Then you should know about TiltSite, a very active site dedicated to the Tilt. If the Tilt name doesn't ring a bell, it's the ATT branded version of HTC's Kaiser aka TyTN II, the latest in a long line of devices with a 2.8 inch QVGA screen and slide out QWERTY keyboard.

Tiltsite, which seems to be a spin off from .mobilitysite.com, is a news blog featuring the latest tips ,tricks and hacks for getting the most out of your Tilt along with software and accessory reviews.

The mobile edition of Tiltsite uses the WP-PDA Wordpress plug-in which creates a single column "middle web" site which is bigger (about 45KB including images) than a mobile site but smaller than a full-web one. WP-PDA is a good fit for the Tilt's Mobile Windows Explorer browser and the new breed of mobile full-web browsers from Opera and Netfront.

There is a Forums link on TiltSite's mobile edition which leads to the full (not mobile) version of Mobilitysite's HTC Kaiser/TyTN II/ AT&T Tilt message board.

Jul-2010: Redirects to MobilitySite.com

Gizmo5 has a new mobile web front end to their IP based Internet telephony and messaging platform. It's sort of the Swiss Army Knife of mobile web based communications. Gizmo lets users communicate by IM on nine different networks and by SMS, e-mail and voice - all from a single integrated contact list.

 

Gizmo5 is often compared with Skype. Both let you make free computer to computer calls and low cost calls to phones worldwide. Unlike Skype though, Gizmo5 is based around open protocols, SIP for VOIP and Jabber for IM. This has the advantage of allowing Gizmo to connect with other networks using these protocols including Yahoo, MSN,  AIM, ICQ, iChat, Jabber, QQ, XMPP, Gadu-Gadu and MySpace IM

More...

Acquired by Google and shut down 4-Apr-2011

An independent, fan-created web site for news, information, and opinions about the Washington Nationals baseball club.

If you have a basic phone or pay by the KB, avoid cliking the headline news links under each story which lead directly to non mobile content.  The site's blogs are a little better but still have page sizes of up to 40 KB. Source: Oh! Mobile Directoy

11-Dec-2011: Sut dow. Read the site's obituary

German high performance and collector car market place.  Browse listings for everything from a $600,000 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing coupes to a $7,000 Porsche 912. Covers Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche. Lot's of nice photos of the cars. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Domain has expired along as has its non-mobile counterpart thewerksregistry.com

Hotel.mobi continues the tradition of mobile hotel search sites being useless and/or unusable. The company behind the site issued promissing sounding a press release:

"Hotel.mobi, a portal run by Quinv SA, a Luxembourg-based company that invests in domain names and high value web portals, has announced the official launch of its website, http://www.hotel.mobi a web directory enabling mobile users to find the hotels near their current location and call the hotels' booking desks in one single click." 

I had high hopes for hotel.mobi. When I visited the site with a PC browser i saw a non-mobile page promoting the mobile version: "Find hotels instantly in the city you are in then simply click to call to make a reservation." The promotional page goes on to say that the mobile site features "Geo Loacalisation", "The best and most recent prices" and Google maps.

All of which makes it sound like Hotels.mobi is the answer to travelers' prayers, finally an easy to use mobile site that actually lets you quickly find and book the best hotels deals using only your mobile browser.

So I went to hotel.mobi with my N95 and typed in "San Francisco".  I got a 115 results, basically just a  list of hotel names in alphabetical order; no prices, no address, no phone number and no indication if these hotels had any availability.  That's not a good start, to be useful for price comparison, prices need to be included in initial results and there needs to be a way to filter or sort by price.  You also don't want to see listings for hotels that are full and you need to have some indication of how far away each property is.

Not giving up, I clicked on several of the hotels to see if the promised features were buried a bit deeper.  When I clicked a hotel name I got a page with just the hotel's address and a "Display Details" link that led to yet another page  with  a description of the property and it's amenities. But there was no map, no prices and no click to call phone number, in fact no phone number at all, although a few hotels did list an mailto: email address or a fax number. I tried using Opera Mini and got the same results as with the built-in browser.

What a huge disconnect between what's promised and what's actually delivered.  I'm hoping that the advanced mobile site described in the press release and on the PC web site is just not quite finished yet and what I'm seeing is an old or placeholder version. I'll be watching hotel.mobi for the next few days and will update this post if the situation improves. For now at least, Hotel.mobi continues the tradition of mobile hotel search sites being mostly useless.

Even if hotel.mobi does eventually turn in to something great, sending out press releases and doing promotions on the web for something that isn't actually available seems like a bad idea. I'm sure few if any mobile visitors to hotel.mobi in it's current sorry state will ever return. Source: TMC.net via Mobility.Mobi

6-Jul-2011 hotel.mobi has become a desktop web site promoting an iPhone app

Formerly ZOMGitsCj, Unleash the Phones covers (mostly) Nokia and Symbian news, reviews and tips from Clinton Jeff. 

 

10-Apr-2017: Redirects to spam and porn sites.

The mobile edition of Sitepoint.com from the tech book publisher has web design and development tutorials, articles and podcasts.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory Mobile view by Mobify.me

Update 10-Apr-2012: SitePoint no longer has a mobile formatted or responsive site.

Canadian TV broadcaster CTV, which provides Olympics TV coverage in Canada has a first rate mobile Olympics site with news, results, medal count, photos and CTV Olympics broadcast schedule. Source: mobiThinking

Dec-2010: Site is gone.

TweetMeme is a new meme tracker that aggregates the most popular links on Twitter and organizes them into  categories. Listings include number of Tweets, a typical Tweet's message, title of the linked page and the link itself which generally doesn't point at a mobile friendly page. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

26-Sep-2012: Shut down

Mark Guim's blog features news, guides, reviews, previews and videos covering Nokia  devices and software.

Jun-2012 - No longer has a mobile formated version.

This is an interesting approach to free music. Tube2Mp3 lets you search YouTube for videos and convert the audio portion into a downloadable mp3.  The only downside is that it takes several minutes to convert a file.  While converting the screen auto refreshes periodically to avoid a browser timeout.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Redirects to a warex site.

Pbushx2's blog covers América Móvil's US based Tracfone, Net10 and Straight Talk prepaid MVNO brands. The site has phone reviews, service and phone tips and tricks and extensive, frequently updated lists of airtime promotion codes.

Offline

Oprah's mobile site offers recent stories from Oprah.com on Health, Style, Relationships, Home & Garden, Food, Entertainment and Money.  The image heavy articles are aggressively paginated which makes them readable on low end devices but a chore to navigate on smartphones.

5-Feb-2012 No longer has a mobile site

IPhoneAlchemy, whose main product is selling manga as iPhone photo libraries,  has built this interesting free touch web manga reader. The AJAX bases webapp works a as well as any dedicated bookreader app with a tap on the left or right edge of the screen quickly flipping to the next or previous page respectively. With it's extensive use of JavaScript and CSS iPhone Alchemy is not for embedded feature phone browsers but works well the IPhone and Android browsers.  It's fully functional if a bit slow in Opera Mini too.

8-Dec-2010 - Site is down!

Although the web reader is slick the actual content is promotional and only the first chapter of each manga is available. It's a shame that the full manga's are not available to the users of non-iPhones devices that the reader works so well on.

17-Dec-2010 - Site is down

Online directory of sites that T-Mobile USA prepaid users can browse for free.

Parked domain.

HP/Palm's Getting Started video tutorials and tips for new webOS users. The well made videos do a great job of demonstrating the largely unrealized potential of WebOS.

Redirects to a non-mobile page

Professional bicycle racing coverage with an emphasis on British riders. Hasn't been updated since 2004!

Send email, SMS and pager messages.

6-May-2006: Site is down.

Microsoft is in the middle of a massive roll-out of a new and revamped Live portal which they have dubbed Windows Live Wave 3.  Wave 3 is all about social networking.  Live users now have a  Profile complete with picture, status-like "personal message" and a "What's new with your network" feed of what your Live friends and contacts are doing.  The existing 30 million user Windows Live Spaces social network, which is especially strong in Asia and on mobile, is still around but it's looking a little neglected with many of it's features duplicated in the new Live portal.

The latest mobile Live has a subset of the features in the full Live Wave 3.  It looks nothing like the simple page of links to other Microsoft mobile web sites that has been at mobile.live.com for the last couple of years. Design wise it's quite simple and elegant with everything new contained in just four pages; Home, People, Photos and Profile.

More...

Dec-2012: Microsoft is dumping the "Live" name and has shut down the Live portal.

Timetable and flight status. Timetables include low fare airlines like Southwest and automatically suggest alternate airports.

Update 8/15/06: OAG no longer offers a mobile site

Dead 12/4-12/11 2004. 3/17/05 Main page comes up but links return 500 error.

Successor to the long-time PDA site, FoxPop. The new incarnation is called @FoxPop and offers the same sort of original articles and reviews as the original, however the site is updated with a new article on an irregular schedule rather than in a monthy magazine format. @FoxPop articles tend to be lengthy, very well-written, thoughtful pieces which contain information you won't find anywhere else. Highly recommended.

Update: 7-Sept-2008: Site is down.

Wpdated 22-Apr-2007: Neither a mobile site or even much about mobile anymore.
General smartphone news and podcasts

Product announcements, reviews and forums

Site is down 09-Dec-2006

The mobile edition of everythingTreo.com. Has access to the everythingTreo forums and a directory of mobile links.
31-Aug-2006 No longer a mobile site

Discussion forums for users of the BlackBerry mobile email devices and smartphones.

27-Oct-2008 Dead Link, BlackBerry Club is now a non-mobile front end to BlackBerryNews.com, BlackBerryFAQ.com, and BlackBerryForums.com

Mobile news blog. Read and discuss the latest news about phones, techology, software and the cellular industry.

Update 5/5/2006 Site is gone, Domain for sale

News site covering Sprint PCS. New hardware and software product announcements, undocumented codes, tracks updates to BitPim an open source CDMA PC Sync tool.

Update 3/2006 mobile site combined with pcsIntel.com http://www.pcsintel.com

A huge collection of recipes, over 38,000.  As the name implies, Spud Link is dedicated to the potato. However the recipe database is not restricted to spud dishes and includes recipes for every occasion. Source: Mobile Mammoth

31-Mar-2013: Expired domain

The mobile version of MSN Spaces has really changed since I last looked at it five months ago. I'd say it's almost a complete redesign.

I'm sure you've heard of Spaces - Microsoft's blogging/social networking platform. Spaces can be used as a pure blogging platform but its social aspect sets it apart from traditional blogging platforms like Typepad or Blogger. The social part comes from tight integration with MSN Messenger and Hotmail (a link to your latest blog post can appear in your mail or messaging sig) and the fact that you can restrict various bits of content or your whole Space to only your mail contacts or Messenger buddy list. Spaces is an ideal platform for technophobes who want to create a personal journal, but the tools are also there to create a quite sophisticated blog with integrated music and video, custom html, feeds, trackbacks, advertising and the ability to ping services like Technorati. Hosting and everything else about Spaces is free although you have to subscribe to MSN Premium ($99/year) to remove the image ads that Microsoft puts your Space. There are restrictions on what you can name your Space and what you can post (especially if you live in China!) but probably no more so than with similar hosted platforms like Yahoo! 360 or Blogger.

Whatever you think of it, Spaces is turning into one of the web's big successes stories. Granted, with the Microsoft name and promotional engine behind it, Spaces was guaranteed to be pretty big. But I think even Microsoft was surprised at how much of a success it has become. While it's difficult to come up with hard data, most estimates put the number of Spaces blogs at over 30 million. That's huge, probably ten times bigger than Yahoo's similar 360 and approaching the number of "serious" blogs that ping services like Technorati.

So what's new with the mobile version of Spaces? A major change is that if you have a photo album on your Space it now also appears in the mobile version. Also new is keyword searching of all of Spaces. Search, which was added to mobile at the same time that the full web version got it, is helpful in finding blogs and items that match your interests and is also the easiest way to jump from one Spaces blog to another. The appearance of blog posts has been improved - more of the formatting is carried over to the mobile version. There are some very useful new access keys - press a single key to do any of the following:

* - top of page
2 - Comments
4 - Add comment
1 - Previous entry/page/photo
3 - Next entry/page/photo
6 - Archives
7 - Delete
9 - This Space's home
0 - MSN Spaces home
# - Jump to the navigation menu

These access keys are consistent across the other new Microsoft mobile web products like Live Mail and Live Search. Speaking of the Live brand, Microsoft has announced that MSN Spaces will be renamed Live Spaces this summer.

Mobile Spaces works very well on almost any WAP2 or cHTML capable device. It appears that user agent sniffing is used to customize page weight and image size to handset capabilities. Good usability and respect for the platform's limitations are two of the hallmarks of good mobile design and Spaces has both. About the only thing I can complain about is that mobile Spaces is rather plain looking. Granted, that can be said about most any current mobile site. There are a only a few sites that manage to combine usability, reasonably small page weight and a visually attractive design. It can be done though, take a look at OSNews, All about N-Gage, PocketPC Magazine and CNet. Spaces has some nice themes on the PC web version - how soon before we see mobile themes?

You can access mobile spaces using the same url as on the desktop, http://spaces.msn.com/blog_name. If a mobile browser is detected, it gets the mobile version. You can force the mobile version to appear even in IE 6 by changing the url to http://mobile/spaces.msn.com/blog_name.

In the some things never change department, most mobile Spaces don't work at all in Firefox or Opera, throwing an XML parsing error. Even desktop Spaces look awful on Opera and FF with truncated text in blog posts in Opera and overlapping text in Firefox. I didn't have any trouble running Spaces on my various phones and mobile emulators but those parsing errors make me suspicious that there will be problems with some handsets.

There are some interesting blogs hosted on Spaces. Two I like:

Hello Sonia The life story of a young, language challenged, British PHD candidate living and doing research in a small town in Japan.

Mike's Lounge is good read. Its the Space of a Microsoft Mobile Program Manager, Mike Smuga. He writes mainly on mobile development topics along with an occasional travelogue. You can find many other Microsoft employee blogs on Spaces as well. Just search from the Spaces homepage on "Microsoft development" or "Microsoft marketing", for example.

To me the single most significant feature of mobile Spaces is that every Spaces blog is automatically mobilized without the user having to do anything - a mobile site is created by default. I think that this is huge. It means 30 million more mobile sites and also that every user who has a Spaces blog now has the incentive to try out the mobile web - to check out their mobile site. Even more significantly it means that Microsoft is taking mobile very, very seriously. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, in fact, I actually tend to use non-Microsoft products whenever a viable alternative exists. I don't do this because I think Microsoft's stuff is bad (it is generally quite good) or that the company is inherently evil (it's not, consider Bill Gates' philanthropy). No, my reason for avoiding Microsoft is that I want to see choice and competition flourish in the marketplace. Monopolies stifle innovation. We need Firefox, Java, PHP, MySQL, OpenOffice, Apple, Symbian, Palm and other all the other worthy alternatives, to survive and thrive. That said, MS is making some very smart moves in mobile these days. They obviously have a lot of bright, creative people working on their mobile stuff and deserve credit for their good work.

On the handset OS side, Microsoft is also looking very strong - Windows Mobile 5.0 is getting rave reviews and in the US at least, there's a far wider variety of WM devices available than either Symbian, Linux or Palm OS ones. The WM devices also tend to offer more bang for the buck than the competition. It's not unlike when MS-DOS first appeared on the market, 25 years ago. At the time, CPM and the Apple II ruled the desktop. MS-DOS 1.0 really wasn't very good and Digital Research, Apple and the leading vendors of CPM hardware like Kaypro and Osborne didn't consider MS-DOS much of a threat. Now it seems that history is about to repeat itself. Unless Symbian and Access/Palmsource start to compete much more aggressively in the handset market, the Redmond giant will soon be as dominant in mobile OS market as they are on the desktop.

In the mobile web space, I don't think any one player can ever dominate. That's due to the low cost of entry and the long tail - there are just too many niche areas to cover it all. Still, based on recent moves like Live Mobile Search and especially Spaces mobile I think that Microsoft is going to be an even bigger player in the mobile web than then are in the PC web. Mobile Spaces is great and I hope it will encourage MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo and Google, etc. to counter with some tasty new mobile offerings of their own.

Microsoft has shut down Spaces.  All former Spaces blogs were ported to Wordpress.com by Microsoft before the shut down.

Yet another mobilization of Wikipedia. Very similar to Wapedia in design, but this one does break long results up into pages. Unless your mobile can handle long pages, I recommend that you stick to Wapedia.

5/28/06 Site is down.

Go2 offers driving directions with a couple of unique features, My favorite is that you can use a phone number as a location. Entering a phone number on a phone is of course, much easier than entering an address. So if you know the phone number at your start point or destination input is really easy. When I'm lost in a business district, many of the stores have their phone number on their signs so I enter that into Go2 - much easier than typing the full address. Go2 even lets you do a white pages lookup for a person's name and use that as location, assuming that the person has a listed number. Go2 was also the only site that let you specify cross streets to identify a location. You can, of course, also use street addresses. Go2's driving directions module has a number of other features that enhance usability. Most links have accelerator keys. When entering a city, you don't even have to enter a state. Just enter the first few letters of the city name and Go2 will give you a list of all the matches from around the country (far right image).

There is another way to specify an address for directions in Go2. That is to start with the Go2 directory and then use the results of a directory search for a place of business as a starting or ending point. The directory is based on the telephone yellow pages and is a very complete list of business addresses. If you have a Go2 account, you can also use one of your saved locations or favorites as a starting or ending point. I covered the Go2 directory in a previous post. It's a very powerful but not particularly user friendly application that is well worth learning if you are at all interested in using your mobile for real world navigation.

Go2's results are from TeleNav and are the same as Google and Yahoo's. Go2 has both WAP1 and WAP2 versions of their pages, delivering one or the other based on browser detection. There is no way to specify which one you will get. In my testing, I always got the WAP1 version except with the Nokia 6230 emulator which received a WAP2 page. Unfortunately I was not able to use Go2 successfully on that emulator. After entering my start address, the emulator reported a parsing error, Go2 is probably sending some invalid xhtml. I had no problems using several other emulators and devices which however all received the WAP1 wml version of Go2. I could not find a direct link to Go2's driving directions that would work with all browsers. The best way to get to Go2's driving directions is by chosing the Directions link on the Go2 front page at go2.com.

Go2 no long offers driving directions

I received an email yesterday from a gentleman named Eduardo Casais asking me to take a look his company's mobile World Cup site. The company is called Areppim AG and appears to be a web design firm in Berne, Switzerland. I'm rather impressed by the site and wanted to get this post up before tomorrow's Germany - Italy match. Areppim has come up with an unusual and interesting concept and an excellent mobile site from the standpoint of usability and compatibility with a wide range of devices.

The site, WC'06 is a World Cup statistics site with a unique twist. Statistics are presented on WC'06 primarily in the form of graphs. For each team in the tournament there are graphs of various statistics such as goals per match, relative time of ball possession, shots per match and number of red and yellow cards. There is a comparison feature that lets you can lay the graphs of any two teams on top of each other useful for making predictions and for bettors I would think. The coverage of matches is unusual too. They are presented as a time-line with various colored symbols on the line showing where each goal, card or substitution occurred. I don't know if the match time-lines are updated in real time but am hoping that they are.

The site worked well on all the emulators and devices I have at my disposal. Areppim is doing a great job of resizing images to match browser resolutions. The pages are small, under 5 KB including images so they load fast and aren't going to hit any browser limits. WC'06's user interface is well thought out too. The charts are grouped under categories like "performance", "strength" and "evaluations". You enter a group and choose a team or teams. You select a next link to cycle through the various charts in each category. Selecting exit at any point takes you back to the team selection level and pressing exit again takes you back up to the category selection page. I found the navigation very easy to use. I wish my Motorola phone's menus were as consistent and intuitive. I also found WC'06 fun and addictive to play with.

Down

This is the same concept as the NY Times River but for the BBC, all the BBC news feeds gathered together on one mobile page, continuously updated. Great site for Opera Mini or smartphones on a 3G network. There are no ad landing pages on the BBC making this River a more seamless experience.

May-2010: Site is down.

The Cape Cod Times, is a Dow Jones owned daily from Massachusetts' well know summer resort area. The PDA style mobile edition features about 40 articles from the paper in text-only handheld form. All stories in all sections are linked off the home page which is about 35 KB - a little too large for some phone's built-in browsers

Crash.Net is a very extensive motorsports site with a sick name covering everything from NASCAR to Rally to F1 and MotoGP. It's an old-school text-only PDA site but features lots of in-depth well written stories
Down 14-Mar-2007

Tailrank tracks the web for the hottest and best stories. The site has a mobile friendly front page but also has links directly to non-mobile blog posts. Clearly the target is Smartphone and Opera Mini users rather than the great unwashed using the embedded browsers on their feature phones. Tailrank has sections for Breaking News, Politics, Tech and Entertainment.

17-Jun-2009: Tailrank has joined the deadpool.

News from the West African Republic of Cameroon. Interesting reading, too bad the page colors of gray on orange are unreadable on some devices!

Down 19-Oct-2008 - Site is displaying a MySQL error.

Plusmo, which started out as a mobile widget platform, has expanded their focus to include the mobile web. This site, which unlike the rest of Plusmo requires no registration, which offers NFL (American Professional Football) scores, live play by play reports, stats and news. Plusmo's also added a mobile web interface to their widgets at plusmo.com/wap (free registration required).

10-Jan-2010 - Scores haven't been updated in four months!

Ask - Directions (m.ask.com/ddhome.jsp?form=dd) Ask.com's mobile driving directions site now features a clever voice recognition system that works with any web enabled phone. To use it you start at Ask's mobile search page, m.ask.com and instead of typing your origin and end addresses you can click on Directions (NEW! Voice Entry!) which places a phone call to dialdirections.com's voice recognition system where you say your starting and ending addresses. The service sends you a text message with a link to a mobile web page containing the directions. It's kind of low tech but very effective From: jkOntheRun

Ask no longer offers driving directions.

Berry Bloglines is another useful mobile web app from profilic developer of free Blackberry applications, Phil Bogle. Berry Bloglines is an alternate mobile web front end to the Bloglines RSS reader. Although designed for Blackberries, it should work on just about any web enabled mobile phone. External links are transcoded by Skweezer. Strangely, Berry Bloglines doesn't let you login with your Bloglines Blog ID, you have to use the email address associated with your Bloglines account which is a PITA for me as I signed up for Bloglines using an impossible to remember disposable email address!

Dec-2010: Bloglines was acquired by Merchant Circle who immediately shut down the mobile edition.

Google Notebook finally has a mobile version. The mobile Notebook is rather limited, all you can do is view your notes and create a new text note by keying something in. The full web version is much more powerful thanks to Google's Notebook Extensions for FireFox and IE which lets you highlight text on any web page and right click to create an instant note. I'd really like to see Google create a mobile browser application ala Opera Mini with Notebook (and Google Maps, Reader and Bookmark) integration built in.

Update: July-2012 - Google has shut down Notebook.  Existing notes where transfered to Google Drive

Radar is a photo sharing site that uses the closed network model like the original Facebook. Pictures are shared with your network of friends and no one else. Friends can comment and reply to each others comments and private messages (which Radar calls "Whispers") are supported. Your photos and your friends photos can be viewed on Radar's web and mobile sites or with a downloadable mobile Java application. There's also a Facebook app and AIM integration. Uploading is by MMS to an email address or by using Shozu . From: SMS Text News where it was picked as an "Application of the Week.

Parked page

Hosted by Go2, The Sporting News'  text-only college basketball page has March Madness scores, standings, statistics, and news.

17-Mar-2010: No March Madness coverage on the Sporting News mobile site!!!

Shut down March,2008

AskMeNow is a mobile search service which claims to "have all the answers" The site consists of a portal with news, sports, finance, entertainment, etc. sections each containing about 10 headline stories. Most of the sections also have a search box or two offering specific types of search relevant to the section's topic. For example, the entertainment section offers horosope and movie showtime searches. AskMeNow's homepage consists of links to all the sections and a Wikipedia search box.

I like AskMeKnow's approach to search, it's quite intuitive to chose what you're interested in and then either pick from a list of news links or a enter a tailored search.

skMeKnow does some content adaptation, images are resized based on screen size, but long news items are not paginated. One of the stories in the NASCAR section consists of a single page with 45 KB of preformated text, too large for many phones. And because it's preformatted and contains a wide table it requires extensive horizontal scrolling to read in Opera Mini.

Another mobile web front end to Twitter. Very similar to Twitter's own mobile version and to Twapper . All three let you post and read tweets from the Twiterers you're following. Twapper displays a lot more tweeks than the others and includes the Twitterer's picture with every tweet making it's pages a little heavier but still under 20KB. Like the other two mobile web Twitter clients, Twapper doesn't let you search for new people to follow which seems like a missed opportunity.

25-May-2013: Site is down, OAuth error.

The Times has a dedicated Olympics page with lots of coverage including dozens of full length stories and photos, a daily Olympics schedule, latest results by sport and a medal counter.

Offline until 2016

Washington Mutual, which was recently aquired by JPMorgan Chase Bank still operates under it's own name and URL.  The mobile site lets users find branches and ATMs, view balances and transactions, transfer funds between their accounts and receive SMS account alerts.

Redirects to chase.com

A Product of AOL, Asylum is a men's lifestyle site covering humor, weird news, fashion, sex tips, dating, style, food & wine, gadgets, tech, music, movies, events, health, fitness, entertainment and weirdness. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

AOL has shut down Asylum

My favorite mobile search engine, Taptu, added a new option today - "real-time" search. So what is real time search and how is it different from plain old search?

Google is pretty quick at updating its index. I typically find that my own posts show up in Google within about an hour and searches for specific breaking national or international news stories return something relevant in Google as soon as the story hits major news sites. But that's not real-time search.

"Real-Time Search" is more of a Web 2.0 codeword than a metric of actual search engine speediness. It refers to searching the "Real-Time Web", which is another codeword that mostly means "Twitter". The idea is that people constantly Tweet about stuff as soon as they see or hear of it and that a 140 character Tweet only takes seconds to compose, unlike an AP news item, for example, that might take 15 minutes to write, edit and post to the wire. Recently Twitter, and to a lesser extent sites like Facebook and Digg, have been scooping major news organizations with the first reports of events like the Iranian election protests, September's Indonesian earthquake and the TWA Hudson river crash. The message is that if you want to find out what's happening in the world, follow Twitter not CNN.

Taptu is getting its real-time results from OneRiot which searches Twitter and Digg to find breaking news and buzz. Rather than linking directly to Tweets and Diggs, OneRiot looks for the most shared links within them. A OneRiot search result looks a lot like one from Google or Bing, a list of links to and descriptions of content from a wide variety of web sources.

At least initially, Taptu's One Riot powered real-time search (labeled "Buzz") is only available on the iPhone and Android devices, at least officially. I found that Taptu's iPhone/Android start page can be accessed using any browser at taptu.com/home. It works very well in Opera Mini 4.2 (images above) and 5.0. It also works in the Nokia browser on my N95, with some minor layout issues. Taptu's real-time search enabled iPhone version, which has a page size of around 40 KB and doesn't require JavaScript, should be at least functional, if not pretty, in the vast majority of mobile browsers. It looks best on devices having good CSS support and screens at least 320px wide.

August, 2011: Taptu's mobile web version has been discontinued.

A beautifully designed blog by a professional writer and cooking instructor, Diana Kuan covers the cuisines of China. It's full of recipes, restaurant reviews and reminisces of the author's experiences growing up in the kitchens of her family's restaurants. Mobile view by Mobify.

No longer has a mobile version

User forum for customers of US CDMA MVNO, PagePlus. Discussions cover technical issues and refill discounts. The board also helps users connect with PagePlus dealers willing to provide free activations, ESN changes and other services.

Jun-2011: Parked Domain

Nokia Beta Labs have launched Ovi Calendar 1.6. While there will eventually be an app, Calendar 1.6 is currently available only on the mobile and desktop webs.  The major enhancements in 1.6 are support for multiple calendars and shared calendars. Other features include a To-Do List, Notes and the ability to organize calendar items by category.

Web access to Ovi Calendar is no longer available.

 

 

A Twitter client based on the Dabr open source project. This one customizes the Dabr UI a little more than most Dabr implementations using an attractive theme and touch friendly menus. There are also some additional features including emoticons, auto text and support for tweets longer than 140 characters using twtmore or kanvaso.

Redirects to random full page ads

Sushis.mobi, winner of the Mobi of the Month Award at mobility.mobi includes an extensive descriptions of sushi varieties, videos showing how to make and eat sushi, listings of sushi books and collectables on eBay and a search engine for finding local Sushi bars.

Parked domain

Stock quotes and online trading for E*Trade customers. Site is very full-featured but suffers from slow response.

6-May-2006 Site is down.

Down 02/18/05

Another huge (667 sites) PDA link directory.

08/18/2006 Site is Down.

News, weather, sports, chat, downloads, trip planners, walking directions. Many features only available to Vodafone subscribers. Interface optimized for Vodaphone handsets may not work well or at all on others Dead Link: 2/4/2006 Site is no longer acceasble at leat from outside the Vodaphone network.

PDA news and articles. Hasn't been updated since 2009

Now redirects to EnterpriseMobileToday's non-mobile site.

Mobile Edition seems to no longer exist - 2/12/05

Treo forum and link directory and downloads

Parked page.

In depth stories with an anti-establishment emphases.

No longer has a mobile formated version and not a responsive site.

Complete archive of FoxPop, the online outstanding monthy PDA magazine published from 1998 to 2004. Early one, Foxpop was devoted to the GeoFox, a short lived Psion OS handheld. After the demise of the GeoFox, FoxPop began to cover all aspects of mobile computing with sections devoted to Psion, Pocket PC and Palm devices and even laptops. FoxPop articles tended to be well written and rich in detail. FoxPop lives on today as @FoxPop which is non longer a monthly but is updated with a new article every few weeks.

Update: 7-Sept-2008: Site is down

Flight departures and arrivals, check seat availability. Hasn't been working since 04/15/05.

Wireless forum for Sprint PCS users. WAP access is read-only and no registration is required. Topics covered include phone and sprint store reviews, buy and sell forum and the unique firmware tracker (Sprint is one of the few carriers to offer free firmware upgrades at their stores, but you need to know when to ask for an upgrade). Update 3/2006 - Shut down.

WineSquire.com is for wine enthusiasts and anyone intersted in learning about wine. Features include wine reviews, Retailer Directory (Washington State US only), Party Planner (how much wine, etc. will you need for 100 guests), Cheese/Wine Pairings, Vintage Charts and Tasting Terminology.

No longer a mobile formatted site

 

A basketball fan named Ross has created a fun NBA mobile page called All-Time NBA Top 50 (home.swbell.net/hartley4/pocketnba.htm). Basically it's an exhaustive list of the top 50 players all-time in a number of categories including points, rebounds, shots blocked, games played and about 15 more. There are also a couple of interesting articles by Ross on the site, one on how the 1998 strike keep some players from topping the record books and the other on the chances that anyone will ever break several notable records like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,387 points or Wilt Chamberlain's 23,924 rebounds. If you're into bucket ball statistics, this is a fascinating mobile site.

Dec 2010 - Site is gone

Like Google's Mobile Web Search, AOL gives you typical web search engine capabilities (using Google's index). When you view the results of your search and click something you want to browse, AOL transcodes the site into a series of mobile friendly pages. AOL uses browser detection to vary the size of the pages it returns. Depending on the browser the maximum page size varies from approximately 3KB to 30 KB. Images are resized to from 80 x100 pixels to 640 x 480 px again depending on the browsers capabilities.

When it was first launched, I found AOL's transcoding engine to be fairly good, it seemed a litttle better than any of the others at preserving the original site's look and feel. It kept the site's background and text colors and resized images in proportion to the mobile browser's screen size. Over the years, AOL's transcoder has changed for the worse. It no longer maintains the transcoded site's background colors - sites are the same dull black on white as in the other transcoders and AOL's transcoder seems to fail with an error quite frequently. AOL hides navigational elements such as the links to Reviews - Mobile - RSS - Archives at the top of this site. AOL's approach to collapsing content is not as intuitive as Google's. At the top on every page AOL puts a Find it Fast link, clicking this brings up a menu (second image) where you can choose Navigation Bar to get to those hidden links. When I saw the Search link on the menu I hoped it would lead to a generic search of the current site - unfortunately it's just a link to the search form that is part of the blog. AOL's transcoder doesn't handle secure sites, I was not able to complete a booking on www.southwest.com, when trying to get to the secure page where one enters credit card information, I got the error shown in the third image.

Unlike Google, there is no way to directly enter a url to be transcoded. You can get around this by using a url like

http://mobile.aolsearch.com/lnk000/=http://yeswap.com/blog/

and replacing 'http://yeswap.com/blog/' with the url you want to transcode. Or use the form I created on yeswap.com to enter a url for AOL to transcode.

AOL's transcoding engine is provided by a third party, Infogin.

Apr 2012 - AOL do longer offers a mobile transcoding service

Yahoo quietly released a major upgrade to their mobile web based search product last month. I'm surprised that there wasn't more buzz on this as I think it's a pretty big deal. I can't find an official Yahoo announcement and only one blogger, a Yahoo employee, seems to have written anything about it.

So what's new? The big change is that when you do a Web search, Yahoo now includes mobile sites in the results - Yahoo used to only search for desktop sites and returned a transcoded-to-mobile copy of site. The problem with that is that transcoded PC web sites are usually not very attractive or even usable on handheld browsers. To me, transcoding is a crutch that lets you get to data that isn't otherwise available in a mobile format. Someday we may have "one web" usable on both desktop and mobile but that will require both better mobile browsers and greater awareness of the needs of mobile users on the part of web designers. Lately the number of true mobile sites has been growing at an astounding rate and I want my mobile search to first and foremost find mobile sites. Only if I'm not satisfied with the mobile results, will I the transcoded desktop results.

Google has pretty much owned the mobile search space since they launched their mobile web search in 2001. There simply haven't been any other true mobile search sites. Oh, there are other sites that claim to do mobile search. I list a number of them in the Wap Review directory under Search/Web-WAP Search. But other than Google I don't think any of those sites actually have working web crawlers, they are just searching of a static local database of submitted sites.

Yahoo is offering the first real alternative to Google in mobile web search. In my trials it works pretty well. When you do a mobile search on Google you have to specify if you want to search the "Web" or the "Mobile Web". With Yahoo, you just do a "Web" search. The results page lists the 3 top "Web" results (top image) followed by the 3 top "Mobile Web" results (2nd image). Below the web results is a More Web Results link and below the mobile results there's a More Mobile Web Results link. Interestingly, if do your search on the UK Yahoo portal (uk.sushi.wap.yahoo.com/p/search), the mobile results come first before the web results while on Yahoo's US portal (us.wap.yahoo.com/p/search) the order is reversed. I don't know if this is a coincidence or if Yahoo believes British mobile users value mobile results more highly than we in do in the US.

When you visit a desktop web site from the "Web Results" group within Yahoo search the results are transcoded by Yahoo into a more mobile friendly form. Actually, Yahoo only transcodes results if it recognizes that your browser is not a full web browser. So if you try mobile search from Opera Mobile or Mini, any version of Netfront or Pocket Internet Explorer you'll get the full desktop version rather than the transcoded one. This is generally a good thing as the aforementioned browsers do a much better job of adapting desktop sites to a mobile format than any of the transcoders. I did note a problem with Sanyo's CDMA phones for Sprint which have a Netfront browser that is not a full web browser. These Sanyo phones need a transcoder to handle most desktop pages but Yahoo won't serve transcoded content to them.

I found Yahoo's transcoder is rather limited. It does split large pages into multiple smaller ones and it tries to hide menus to emphasise the content "meat" of pages. But unlike Skweezer, and the transcoders connected to Google, AOL and Windows Live mobile search, Yahoo's doesn't re-size images to fit the mobile screen - it simply strips all images out. Here are some screen shots comparing Nokia Europe's main support page as it appears in the Yahoo (image right), Google (below left) and AOL (below right) transcoders. While the Yahoo transcoded pages work pretty well most of the time they certainly aren't very pretty. I did a 4 part post on the mobile transcoder landscape a year ago before Yahoo's transcoder was available. In those posts I tested each transcoder ability to render this blog and the Southwest Airlines site, www.southwest.com. The Yahoo transcoder did pretty with the WAP Review Blog. Long pages were split at around 8KB which should work on any device and the search form worked properly. The comment and contact forms didn't, failing with the message "Unable to adapt page for mobile browser". I got the same error on on a couple of other pages but when I retried it worked on the second try. The Yahoo transcoder did not do as well with the Southwest Airlines site test which consists of going through the steps of booking a flight. Only one of the other transcoders (Phonifier) was able to complete this task but Yahoo did worse than most - the first reservations page was unusable because it was missing all the entry fields like travel dates, departure and arrival airports and even the submit button - there was no way to event start the process of booking a flight! Compared with the other seven transcoders I looked at a year ago, I'd put Yahoo in the bottom half of the pack, behind Google, AOL, MobileLeap and Skweezer.

While I'm not wasn't wowed by Yahoo's transcoder, I'm very pleased to see that Google finally has real competition in the mobile search field. Yahoo consistently returned more mobile hits than Yahoo for the searches I tried. In quality and relevance of mobile results I rate Yahoo and Google roughly equal although both returned a much higher percentage of irrelevant or duplicate hits than than the same searches of the full web. I think this is a function of there being so many more desktop web sites than mobile ones. Web searches are sorted by relevance so with fewer total results, the less relevant ones appear nearer to the top of the list.

Update 16-Sep-2007: Yahoo Classic is no more. This URL now redirects to oneSearch.

NBC TV's Movie industry Gossip and New Show now on the mobile web.

No longer has a mobile or responsive web design version

Mobile forum of PPC6700users.com a site devoted to extending the capabilities of Sprint's version of the HTC Apache Windows Mobile Smartphone. No registration is required to browse this friendly forum.

Down 20-Apr-2009

Real-time listing of what music is playing right now at bars and clubs in your city.

17-May-2009 - Shut down and incorporated into MyStrands.

A music recommender that taps into the wisdom of the crowds. Submit your playlists to MyStrands and it will recommend music that other users with similar taste enjoy.

July-2009 - MyStrands shuts down.

Reuters UK has an Olympics page with results and stories from the games at uk.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/Category/eUK/COLYU. BTW, there ought to be a law against such long URLs on mobile sites, some people actually type these things in on the keypad! The site features lots of images, 40 of the opening ceremonies alone. The images are re-sized to fit the screens of different phone models and are shown one per page for fast loading even on slow connections.

Down - 17-Oct-2008.

Vox is a free personal blogging/social networking platform from Six Apart, the company behind TypePad, LiveJournal and MoveableType. Vox has some nice features, WYSIWYG editor, video and audio support and integration with MySpace and Flickr but best of all like MSN Spaces, every Vox blog has a mobile edition. There are no mobile specific URL's, browser detection is used to deliver the mobile edition to supported handsets. There is an unofficial Vox Mobile support group at goingmobile.groups.vox.com/. VOX was suggested by reader and Vox Blogger, ofirdav (ofirdav.vox.com)

Vox was been shut down by Six Apart 30-Sept-2011. Vox bloggers could transistion their sites to free TypePad.com accounts.

NewsGator (m.newsgator.com) is a very promising mobile RSS Reader for users of full-web browsers like Opera Mini, NetFront and Nokia's Webkit. It's as fast as Bloglines and doesn't have Bloglines main annoyances.

Unfortunately NewsGator has one major bug. The Mark as Read link marks every item in a feed or folder as read - including ones that arrived while you are reading and you hadn't even seen yet. Sorry, that's unacceptable. I can't live with a reader that causes me to miss posts.

Read the full NewsGator Mobile review on the Wap Review Blog.

Jube-2009: Web and mobile Web versions of  NewsGator shut down.

Mobilised (mobilised.net/) is the third new mobile bookmarking site. Mobilised works like :bMarks (or Dig), anyone can browse and search the directory but you need to be registered to submit sites, Vote (the Digg equivalent), Bury or comment. The site's front page, labeled Published lists only sites that have received votes, although strangely they aren't in order of most votes. A link at the bottom of the page, marked Upcoming leads to a much longer list of sites that have been submitted but have not received any votes. There are a few categories and you can filter the results to sites submitted in the last day, week or month. You can also search Mobilised and there's a Tag Cloud. The cloud looks especially nice if your browser supports varying font sizes like the Opera Mini 4 Beta does.

Mobilised is full featured and visually quite attractive in a low key way. But I really don't get some aspects of the way it works. The separation of the Published and Upcoming lists for example. Or the fact that sites are not listed in order of most votes in any of the lists or results. What's the point of voting if it doesn't move the site I vote for up in the listings?

Offline since late 2012

The "wisdom of the crowd" concept where the averaged opinions of thousands of people is used to evaluate the worth of a product or idea is a certainly big part of today's web, think of Amazon Reviews, TripAdvisor.com or Digg. As much as it's a part of the current web 2.0 buzz it's not a new idea.

Zagat Survey has been applying the "wisdom of the crowd" since got it's start in 1979 with a New York City restaurant guidebook based on reviews submitted by thousands of reader volunteers. Zagat has since expanded to cover hotels, night spots, golf courses, entertainment and shopping in over 70 cities around the world.

Nowadays besides paper guidebooks, Zagat has a big web presence and offers mobile guide applications for Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry devices. This week they launched Zagat.mobi on the mobile web.

The mobile site's coverage is limited to restaurants, hotels and night spots in 16 US and Canadian cites plus London, Paris and Tokyo. For the covered cites the mobile and web listings seem essentially identical. Like the web site, the .mobi one is free to browse without registration. However the Zagat ratings are only available to paying customers. To see the ratings you must join Zagat for 24.95/year or 4.95/month. Even without ratings Zagat.mobi is useful. The listings give hours of operation, details like type of cuisine and include click to call phone numbers and the ability to send a listing to any phone number or email address. One feature of the mobile site that's not available on the web is tyou can browse Zagat's top 5 picks for quality or price. You can even sort results by those criteria which is almost as good as being able to see the ratings. There's a handy Find Nearby feature for bar hopping or when the wait for a table is too long and you want to find another place in the neighborhood.

The mobile site is well designed with an average page size of 5 KB plus about 9 KB of images. It should load quickly and work well on most phones. Numeric shortcuts speed navigation by providing single click access to features and reviews.

One thing I noticed though is that if you go to zagat.mobi with a desktop browser or a mobile browser that Zagat's doesn't recognize you'll be rediected to the desktop page at www.zagat.com. The biggest, perhaps the only, advantage of a .mobi address is that it should always point to a mobile site. Browser detection is great when it works. The trouble is that it doesn't work 100% of the time. Every site that does browser detection needs to have a direct link to their mobile site on their desktop page and another link on the mobile page that always delivers a desktop page. That gives the user who is redirected to the wrong site a way to recover.

Apr-2013: Zagat no longer offers a mobile webapp.

Online Malay-English, English-Malay dictionary.  This is a WML site and doesn't work with phones without WML support like the iPhone or Android devices.

Site is gone

Mobile version of the Acid Test which checks a browser's compliance with CSS and xhtml standards.

24-Dec-2008: Tests all display a blank page

Heysan (heysan.com, mobile m.heysan.com) was another of the startups which demoed at the Mobile 2.0 Event. It's a mobile web based IM client supporting AIM, MSN, Yahoo IM and ICQ - with support for GTalk "coming soon". Features include the ability to use multiple services simultaneously, a single buddy list across all services, threaded conversation view and auto refresh.

 

I'm not really much of an IM user but I wanted to get a feel for this service so I set up some accounts on AIM and MSN Messenger and played with Heysan a bit. I didn't bother trying ICQ. Does anyone still use that service?

Mobile IM (MIM) isn't very popular compared with either SMS or desktop IM. More...

Apr-2010: Aquired by Good Technolicies and shut down.

Autosport (wmda.eu) is a slick mobile magazine covering mostly European motor racing including F1, F3, DTM, (the German Touring Car Masters series) and A1 Grand Prix. Results, news , driver and circuit profiles are free, streaming 3gp video is available for a fee although I could not find the rates or anyway to sign up on the site.

Site is gone.

Sometimes it's hard to understand Microsoft's Web and Mobile Web branding. There's MSN and there's Windows Live and I never know which one to use. I think back in 2005 when Live was launched it was supposed to eventually replace MSN. It was a full portal; Live Search, Live Spaces, Live HotMail, Live Messenger and a Live homepage with News and Sports. But Live as a replacement for MSN never really took off and it seems to be have been repositioned as MIcrosoft's Search brand.

On the mobile web, the Live Portal concept lives on with MSN Mobile (mobile.msn.com) and LIve Mobile (mobile.live.com) existing side by side. MSN is more of a content site with News and Entertainment headlines and photos on the front page while Live is basically a list of links to all of Microsoft's Mobile Web properties.

Earlier this month Microsoft launched a new Beta version of Live Mobile at mhome.live.com. It's a complete redesign with a search box and link to HotMail at the top, and then your profile photo from Spaces and a What's New feed of updates from your friends' blogs. The links to Microsoft's other Mobile Web properties have been moved to the bottom but can be reached quickly by clicking the More link at the top of the page.

The Beta is certainly an improvement over the old Mobile Live page in that it has some content beyond just links. But I don't understand why the access keys (one-click numeric shortcuts) were removed. Access keys are a great way to reduce click distance, the single most important element of mobile usability.

It is a beta so it's not finished yet. Expect to see some fine tuning and maybe even some new features.

20-Dec-2008: The Beta has ended Visit mobile.live.com/ for the current version of Windows Live which is based on this Beta..

Yahoo's Olympics site currently features a large countdown clock with days, hours and minutes to the start of the games. Yahoo seems to be focusing more on news and results rather than color features. The site is currently showing results from the in-progress US Olympic Trials updated every few minutes. Yahoo's site was created by German mobile development shop NetBiscuits which also did Y!'s March Madness site. The Olympics site has a look and color scheme similar to Yahoo's new mobile portal Beta.

Down - 17-Oct-2008.

Tweete is a light weight (14KB) client that should work well on old or low end phones and/or slow networks. In spite of it's low page weight, Tweete manages to include a lot of features; quick action icons for direct messaging, replies, favoriting and unfavoriting. Tweete also lets you follow new Tweeps and offers the fairly unusual feature of being able to delete one of your own Tweets.

6-May-2014: Shut down

Mobile edition of a news blog covering the United Arab Emirates. Updated frequently throughout the day, EmiratesNews is focused on local news.

Parked domain

Promotional site for Warner Bros. movies, TV series and video games.  Plot or game synopsis, cast lists for movies and shows, free ringtone , wallpaper and video trailer downloads. The image heavy site with pages up to 50KB in size may be too large to load on some phones and the fixed 240px wide layout doesn't scale well to narrower or wider screens,  Navigational is by image links without alt text so that the site is unusable with images turned off. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

No longer has a mobile or responsive web design site.

Free mobile site creator lets you build rich mobile websites without any html knowledge. Includes an RSS reader addon with image resizing. Site use mobile friendly subdomain urls, (site.phn.me) and you can monetize your sites using Admob and other major ad networks.

Redirects to mobile.web.tr, another site bulder

Official mobile site of the US Air Force Thunderbirds precision flying team.  The site has Thunderbirds history, a schedule of performances and free wallpapers, videos and ringtones to download. Source: Mobility.mobi

Shut down

Travel Guide to Los Angeles from one of the leading travel publishers. Lists, hotels restaurants, events, attractions, nightlfe, shopping  and "L.A.'s Five Best Sights for Tourists". Source: Mobility.mobi

Down: 21-Mar-2009

Afrigator is a meme tracker that aggregates the the top posts by African bloggers. The mobile edition is divided into seven categories; Life, Entertainment, Business, Tech, Politics, Religion and Sport with a separate page for each and a front page that caries the top stories from all categories. 

Listings consist of the post title and a short except.  You can click through to read the full article which will not usually be mobile formatted. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Sept-2011: No longer has a mobile edition

Play fantasy cricket on cricket.com with your mobile. The top players each week win signed game balls and photos.  At the end of the season the Grand prize winner will get a signed match shirt from the winning IPL team.  Mobile view by Mobify

Parked domain

StreetLevel is another AOL lifestyle site for young urban males covering fashion, sneakers, cars, games, toys, gadgets, art and film Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

AOL has shut down Streetlevel

An attractive and content rich soccer news site for South Africa's third largest mobile operator, Cell C.  The site has news, results, Fixtures (schedules) and free soccer wallpaper downloads. Source: Mobility.mobi

Site is gone.

A collection of tech-themed mobile short stories in English by Polish writer Niżej Podpisany (aka "Nick Name"). Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Site is gone: Niżej Podpisany's blog is at passwordincorrect.com but his short stories are nowhere to be found.

Kontax is a serialized short story about the adventures of 4 teenagers that you can read on your cellphone.  Register to comment on the story.  Available in English or the South African language Xhosa.

May-2011 Redirects to Yoza Cellphone Stories

This is another mobile file sharing site similar to QFS.mobi (review). Both let you upload and share files of up to 10 MB in size. The main difference is that mobilePLACE has no option to password protect uploads. On the other hand, if you are looking for something to download, mobilePlace wins as all uploaded files are listed in a searchable directory.

N0v-2010 - No longer available.  Redirects to an ad network's desktop page

Keyword search for local businesses anywhere in the US. Listings include hours, address, click to call number, description, map, directions and a link to the business' (not always mobile friendly) website.

1-Nov-2010: No longer a mobile website.

A new "touch web" optimized Twitter client. I like the attractive dark theme. But on my Android phones (Sapphire and Evo) text doesn't wrap properly and horizontal scrolling is required unless I zoom out to a point where text painfully small. This even happens on the Evo's 480 px wide screen! I'm guessing this works well on the iPhone, though.

25-May-2013: Site is down, OAuth error.

Amusing, one-liner "facts" about actor and martial artist, Chuck Norris. Example: "Chuck Norris eats eight meals a day. Seven are steak, and the last is the rest of the cow". You can send any fact to a friend by SMS.

No longer mobile friendly

Email based online web bookmark site.  After registering at zuzmarks.com, bookmark web pages by emailing the link to zumarks. Then log into zumarks.com with your phone or PC to access your bookmarks.

Expired domain

Rich mobile web version of Google Plus with check in and the ability to create circles which are missing in the basic mobile version. Served by default to Android, the iPhone and Firefox Mobile. Also works well in the WebOS, Symbian Belle, bada and Opera Mobile browsers. There's a link to this version at the bottom of the basic mobile version (https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/) that's served to these browsers.

Google Plus has switched to a single mobile view for all devices. https://m.google.com/app/plus/?force=1 no longer forces a different version.

Not a wap page

Mobile edition discontinued 2/15/05

A mobile file sharing and download site.  Share and download mobile wallpapers, ringtones, videos and music.

No longer mobile friendy.

Infospace's mobile Driving Directions site is quite similar to Yahoo's wml site. It's again a Wizard interface, although less elaborate than Yahoo's. There is no way to use previously entered or saved locations. To enter an address you first enter either a zip code or state. Like Yahoo, Infospace gives you the choice of typing a 2 letter USPS state abbreviation or picking a state from a list divided into groups by the first letter of the state name. For choosing a city, Infospace provides a list of the ten largest cities in the chosen state, a nice touch. If the city you want isn't on the list, you have to type it in. Unlike, Yahoo I found that you have to enter the full city name. If I entered SF or San Fran instead of San Francisco, Infospace didn't complain but it gave directions to or from some where else entirely. Infospace handles all browsers well, serving pages with "do"'s for navigation when an Openwave browser is used and links when a non-Openwave browser is used. Infospace's directions were identical to the results returned by Yahoo.

Emulator images courtesy Openwave Systems Inc. Openwave and the Openwave logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of Openwave Systems Inc. in various jurisdictions. All rights reserved.

InfoSpace no longer offers driving directions

Dowload ringtones, wallpaper and games. Chat room.

Service unavailable 5/28/05 - will it be back?

8/4/06 No longer a mobile site.

Participate in IRC chat. Works OK for basic chatting but there doesn't seem to be anyway to send commands like /whois

02-Jul-2008 - Seems to be gone for good.

Find Hotels around the world. Seems to be limited to major cities. It didn't find anything in Green Bay, WI, USA or Dinan, France for example but did for Milwaukee and Strasbourg. The user interface is clunky. You must key in, typically with T9 or triple-tap both the city and the country. Listings are returned as a long list of hotel name, address and phone number in alphabetical order. Phone numbers are not clickable, you have to remember them and key them in.

19-Feb-2013: No longer hasa mobile friendly or responsive web design site.

San Francisco Chronicle's mobile site. Appears to include the entire contents text contents of the paper. Works pretty well as a mobile site although the text that links to articles tends to be very long causing each link to take up multiple lines on a mobile screen. Here's an extreme example:

2 BAY AREA PAPERS TO JOIN GROWING MEDIA GROUP / MediaNews to acquire San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times -- Hearst to provide financial backing, get a stake in operations outside the region. That link fills an 128x160px mobile screen.

Down 07-May-2007

Another day, another World Cup site. Actually, this is a very good one from Australia's Big Pond, a major ISP down under which is owned by the Australian telecom giant, Telstra. Big Pond has an attractive mobile home page, http://wap.telstra.com/wap/ although much of the content is links to external sites like CNN, Yahoo, etc. For the World Cup, Big Pond has commissioned Sportall to produce an original mobile site. On the right device, it's very attractive mobile web design and contains first rate content as well. The qualification is because the site locks content into a fixed size div. The div width is either 166 or 176px depending on some sort of browser detection. There are also header and footer images the same width as the div. At least those were the only sizes I got after throwing a dozen or so user agents at it. I don't see the point of offering only two sizes that are so close together. However as long as your phone has a browser with a screen at least 166px wide or one that can resize images on the fly the site should look great.

There's really a lot of information on this site, more than any of the other World Cup sites I've seen so far. For each of the 32 teams there's a roster of players, schedule of matches, a detailed team profile and one or more pieces about the team's recent matches. For the Australian team, the Socceroos, there is not surprisingly much more - over 20 stories about the team's chances, top players, which opponents they are worried about etc. There are also feature articles on the front page previewing Saturday's opening matches and approximately 20 additional general World Cup articles.

Great site, check it out! I've added it to the World Cup page on yeswap.com. Go to yeswap.com on your mobile phone and follow the menu to Sports/World Cup/Big Pond.

Site is gone.

AOL Local seems to be AOL's latest replacement for Digital City Mobile which used to be my favorite city guide but degraded into a bunch of broken links and eventually disappeared completely.  Everything works in AOL Local but compared to Digital City there are far ewer listings and superficial descriptions instead of real reviews.

Redirects to AOL homepage

An extensive trove of wine information by London wine merchant, Berry Brothers and Rudd. Includes wine news, vintage chart, descriptions of wine regions and grape varieties. The emphasis on French wines, but all major world wine regions get some coverage.

No longer a mobile formatted site

Every traveler should bookmark this site on their phone. It's a comprehensive listing of taxicab companies in the US, Canada and UK. The listings do include click-to-call phone numbers. My only complaint is that all 60 or so US cities are on one long scrolling page. Splinting this list up by groups of states would greatly enhance usability.

31-Oct-2010 Parked Page

Mobile edition a very active blog covering the BlackBerry mobile email/smartphone device.

27-Oct-2008 BlackBerryCool no longer has a mobile edition

If you have a blog or other site running Google Analytics you can view charts on your mobile phone with Mostat.

Site is down. Apr-2010

News Alloy is another good mobile(and desktop RSS reader). It's very similar to Google Reader in features and user interface. Google is a better choice for use with the built-in browsers of mainstream phones because it resizes images and splits large posts into multiple pages. News Alloy can deliver pages that are too large for the limited built in browsers of feature phones. On the other hand, with a browser that can handle large images like Opera Mini or a Smartphone browser, News Alloy can be significantly faster than Google Reader. Read the full News Alloy Review on the blog.

Dec-2009: redirects to a Russin language Airline Industry Blog!

HooQ's (m.hooqs.com) is another new mobile video and music site. This is a crowded field and HooQ's is trying to distinguish itself with the concept of channels. A channel is a collection of audio and video content with a common theme like a band, new movie release, "how to do it instructions", UFOs or a major news story. There are many predefined channels and Hooqs will create a custom channel for you based on your interests. Or you can build a channel from any of the content on Hooqs. You create and manage channels on the web and send then to your own phone or a friend's phone as a link in an SMS.

Hooqs has a very eclectic selection of videos, the usual movie trailers, clips of people doing stupid things, newscasts, sports highlights and music videos but also a large selection of how-to instructional videos and several that seem to be medical school lectures.

The site is free and no registration is required to search for and stream or download videos which are in 3gp format. Registration lets you push videos and music to your phone from Hooq's web site and also create and publish channels of your favorite clips from Hooq's catalog. Registration does not require your mobile phone number unless you want to be able to send content to your device.

Currently there is no way to upload your own content. I contacted the site and immediately received a reply that uploading is coming soon as well as higher quality .mp4 videos.

Jan-2010: Hooqs ihas shut down.

A simple but useful site with tables for conversion between Imperial and Metric, Celsius and Fahrenheit, also Cooking Equivalents and a Temperature Converter.

Domain registration expired

Mobi domain registrar mTLD has launched a mobile site search engine and directory. It seems quite complete and good mobile sites regardless of if they are on .mobi domains or not.

Shut down

Launched last April as both a web site and a mobile site, San Francisco based startup Kyte.tv combines video with social networking. With Kyte you create a homepage, which Kyte calls a channel, and add video, images, text and music from your PC or phone. Anyone can visit your channel, and view the content you have shared. Registered users can leave comments, live chat with you and other users and participate in polls. Channels can be embedded on a MySpace page or blog and there's a Facebook app too.

Kyte was designed for mobile from the start, giving it a advantage over sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facbook which have had to graft a mobile web front end on to something that was created with no awareness of the mobile web. I've blogged about Facebook, MySpace and Friendster's mobile sites and they all have have a raft of usability issues most of which are related to their initial implementation as a web only services.

More...

July-2011: Aquired by KIT Digital, a back-end video management provider, and shut down.

Time Warner's Sports Illustrated Magazine, has a comprehensive Olympics section on its mobile site with Olympics news items, results and photos.

Offline until 2016

Blog covering new BlackBerry hardware and software releases and other Blackberry news. Updated several times a  day.  The mobile addition uses Alex King's WordPress mobile plugin. Images aren't resized which should be no problem for BlackBerries but could be for lesser handsets.

Redirects to lifeonmymobile.com which is not mobile optimized.

Local and national news, business news, sports, weather and more from Cornwall, Ontario's information station, AM 1220. Text-only site design combines multiple stories per page and requires a lot of scrolling.  Source: Seaway News.

Radio station and site have shut down.

Mobile front end to Foxmarks, a popular add-on for Firefox, IE and Safari that keeps your bookmarks in sync across computers and securely backed up in the cloud. On mobile Foxmarks offers web based access to your bookmarks.

5-Jan-2015: Redirects to xmarks.com

The Madnews.mobi site is a mobile news feed collection of the best 'Strange but True' and funny news stories from reputable news providers - links to full articles use Mowser.

Dec 2010 - site is gone

A new Formula 1 site with F1 news in brief, results, standings, photos, videos and free ringtone downloads.

Parked Domain Apr-2010

UK based recruitment agency specializing in aviation, defence, engineering, government, IT and telecoms jobs.

Usability on mobile devices is somewhat hampered by the large banner images and several screens full of boilerplate text touting s*com's benefits that job seekers have to scroll through to reach the search form.

An advanced search form dispenses with the verbiage and allows results to be filtered by industry, permanent/contact and U.K./Rest of the World. Source: Mobility.mobi

No longer has a mobile webapp

Health and Fitness articles and videos from print magazine Men's Health.

No longer has a mobile version.

Prague travel guide by an English tourist who became a Czech resident. An insider's guide to the city with recommended hotels, restaurants and attractions and money saving tips for visitors to Prague. Source: Tappity

Site is discontinued

Latest posts on the sport of cricket gathered from the RSS feeds of The Guardian, Telegraph, Cricket Blog, Wisden Cricketer and other cricket sites.

June 2012 Shut Down

Information on how you can reduce your personal energy consumption and production of greenhouse gases by making simple changes to your lifestyle, eating habits and transportation choices.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Shut down

Latest soccer news and live coverage. Dedicated pages with news, results and fixtures for major soccer leagues around the world including the English Premier League, South African Soccer League, Spain's La Liga, the UEFA Champions League and more. Source: Mobility.mobi

Site is gone

Nokia sponsored Royal Artist club, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary is a free blog platform for bands.  Sort of like MySpace but older and not nearly as big with about 50 bands represented currently. Source Nokia Conversations

Nokia still owns the domain but it's inactive

As inplied by its name, WPBeginer is a site aimed at getting newcomers up to speed with the WordPress blogging platform.  Loads of WordPress tips, tricks and tutorials covering topics like WordPress installation, recommended plugins and themes, integration with Feedburner, Facebook and Twitter and lots more. 

No longer a responsive or mobile formatted site.

Relationship and love tips for men, a "Love Calculator" and links to romance related apps on GetJar.

Site is gone.

A new Meme Tracker that gathers the top news stories from around the web based on their popularity on Facebook. Uses the Google transcoder to display mobile formatted versions of the original articles.

No longer a meme tracker, Yedwik as morphed into an "Automated Lead Generator" that auto replies to your competitors posts on Twitter.

Help and articles for N-gage users

26-Jul-2009 Replaced by ovigaming.mobi/

Connect to AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger or MSN Instant Messenger. Messages are sent and received using the browser, doesn't use SMS.

Down: 13-Feb-2008 Parked page.

Catalog of applications for the Open Source Gnome Desktop suite and development toolkit.

Nov-2011: No longer has a mobile version

News of the latest software releases. In spite of the name, covers all platforms not just Microsoft Windows.

05-May-2006; Site is down.

Singapore based mobile phone user forum.There seems to be quite a bit of technical expertise among the posters to this site and a friendly flame-free atmosphere. All brands of phones and carriers from all over the world are covered on AkagiNet. There are also non-technical forums on sports, travel, food etc. Unfortunately, some of the pages are over 3K in size which means that they not load on many WAP 1 phones including some of the latest models.

Down 24-Apr-2008

Unofficial user forums for SonyEricsson owners

1-Sept-2010: Forum appears dead.  No mobile version and can't register or log in.

I've made an addition to the Reviews section of this site. It's a fairly new online forum for cellular enthusiasts, GeckoBeach. This is the eleventh mobile cell phone forum listed on the/Home/Technology/Mobile Phones/Forums page. GeckoBeach is a Canadian based site and has an emphasis on Canadian providers. There is plenty of interest to non-Canadians on the site including phone reviews and experiences of travelers roaming or using local pre-paid sims around the world. The site is quite active, although nowhere near as active as such well established sites as Howard Forums, Esato or GSM Arena - all of which also have mobile editions. One nice thing about GeckoBeach, is that you can browse the entire mobile forum as a guest without having to register (almost all mobile forums require registration - which often can only be done from a PC). Another plus is that the users seem to be more friendly than on many of these phone forums where name-calling, flaming and constant one-upmanship is unfortunately common. The site's not perfect. There is no search function, the links to view a subset of the forum list (A-F, G-K, etc.) all bring up the same long list of all forums. This list page is 3.9 KB which is too large to load on some phone browsers. While some recent phones allow WML pages to be as large as 50 KB, a limit of around 3 KB is much more common and Nokia's from a couple of years ago can only handle 1.4 KB. The same problem occurs with long posts - they can be too large to load. A site like this, which transcodes web content into wireless markup needs to break long pages into manageable pieces. I also got a compile error loading the "American Providers" forum on several phones. The error occurs because of an un-escaped ampersand in the phrase "AT&T". The WML standard requires that all ampersands be replaced with the entity & In spite of these issues, Gecko Beach is worth visiting particularly for Canadians who have phones that can handle the issues with the site.

Jun-2011: Parked Domain

Phonifier is an open source mobile transcoder. Phonifier does not split up large pages and does not resize or reformat images (but does allow you to turn images off). Like loband, Phonifier needlessly replaces a site's backround and foreground colors with boring black on white.

On the plus side, Phonifier did a great job of implementing web forms,it was possible to use all the forms needed to make a booking on the Southwest site Southwest is a secure site but my browser warned me that the connection through Phonifier was not actually secure. I would never use Phonifier for online banking or purchases but it could be useful for logging into developer portals and other secure sites where I don't really have much to lose if my login security is compromised.

Phonifier also handles RSS feeds and does a pretty good job, presenting an index page with entry titles and the first 200 characters of each post. Clicking the title takes you to the full post. For phone browsers it would be better to just show the titles in the index as 200 characters is a full screenfull on a typical phone so a great deal of scrolling is needed to see the whole index.

While I was somewhat disappointed by with Phonifier, at least it's Open Source. Hopefully, someone will grab the source and fix it.

Dec-2010: Parked Page

Feedalot is a new service from Jumbuck, a commercial mobile game seller, dating and chat site. Jumbuck doesn't try to sell it's services to Feedalot users. Feedalot has great potential, the site is fast, shows the number of unread items in the feed index, titles only in the item index and it displays the full item content (except for images). There are a few issues with Feedalot. One is that doesn't break up large items into pages. An other issue is that than when Feedalot removes an image it replaces it with "[Image Removed]" rather than displaying the images alternate text. All links are also removed and replaced with "[link removed]". I don't mind that links are removed but it doesn't seem to add any value to tell me so each time. I've found a couple of alternate urls, intended for PDA's which will show your feeds with images and external links intact. A word of warning, the images are NOT resized to mobile friendly dimensions so proceed with caution if you have metered data access. The two urls, which seem to give identical results are:

http://mob.feedalot.com/feedalot/Palm/ http://mob.feedalot.com/feedalot/PocketPC/

My other, admittedly minor beef with Feedalot, is that it displays each item's description above its content. As the description is usually the first 270 characters of the item, you end up with duplicated content.

Although not perfect, Feedalot is my preferred mobile RSS reader.

14-July-2008: Site is down.

Worldwide guide to club dates, concerts, festivals and theatre.

7/31/2006: whatsonwhen.com no longer offers a WAP edition.

Deutsche Welle or 'DW' is Germany's independent but publicly funded international broadcaster. Somewhat similar to the BBC International Service or the Voice of America, DW broadcasts shortwave radio news, sports and cultural content in 29 languages and satellite TV in four; English, German, Spanish and Arabic. Like the BBC, DW has a comprehensive internet site, DW-WORLD.DE again in 29 languages. Of course I wouldn't be writting abour DW-WORLD unless they had an intersting mobile web site. The mobile site is mobile.dw-world.de and it features almost all of the content from the full web site in different 29 language editions .

The mobile site not only contains most of the articles on the full web site but the articles are also complete, although that's not too hard as DW-WORLD articles tend to be short, averaging 400 words. Most articles are illustrated with a single photo 122px wide. Page weight is mobile friendly, about 7 KB for text and image combined. The UI is reasonably good with a text based navigation menu at the top of the main pages, followed by short headlines linking to the stories. There is some room for improvement, the navigation menu has too many links and fills the first screen and half of the second on a 128x160px device. I'd also like to see access keys on the navigation links and the "To Top" link at the bottom of the page, but it's a very usable design as it stands.

Not surprisingly as Germany is the host nation, DW World has a very good World Cup page, with live coverage and frequently updated headlines.

23-Apr-2012: Redirects to DW World home page

The annual 600 mile stage race from San Francisco to Long Beach kicks off this Sunday (16-May-2010). Among the world class riders in this years event are Levi Leipheimer, Lance Armstrong, Andy Schleck, Tom Boonen and  Fabian Cancellara.

The official Tour of California mobile web site will have live coverage of every stage. VeloNews.com and. CyclingNews.com are also be offering live coverage of the Tour this year at mobile.velonews.com and live.cyclingnews.com respectively.

16-May-2010 Redirects to desktop site

CricketFan.mobi () News blog covering the game of cricket. It's a mashup of headline feeds from cricket sites with links back to the full stories mobilized by Google.

Parked domain

Wachovia is another US bank with branches on the the US east cost, Texas and in the Los Angeles area. The bank's mobile site is available to all Wachovia online banking customers without any additional signup and offers account balances, transaction history, transfer between accounts and an ATM and branch finder. Wachovia was purchase by Wrlls Fargo Bank in December, 2008 but for the time being still opperated under it's own name and URLs.

Redirects to wellsfargo.com

I got an email from Ivan at Wattpad.com announcing his new mobile service, FeedM8. What it does is create a mobile site from an RSS feed. There are other services that do this. But the only ones I can recommend are Mowser (review), Winksite (review) and now FeedM8. I like these three because they are the only ones of the dozen or so I've tried that split long posts into mobile sized chunks and deliver clean and valid markup that works on almost any phone.

Domain is parked - Apr-2010

The main differences between them are that Mowser and FeedM8 resize images while Winksite strips them. FeedM8's image handling is particularly nice. Images display as small, fast loading thumbnails. Clicking a thumbnail gives choice of viewing the image in four different sizes.

If you don't want advertising on your site, only Winksite is ad-free. The other two put ads on your content but both will share the revenue with you. All three services deliver xhtml-mp, the current standard in mobile markup languages. FeedM8 and Winksite also support wml, an older standard that is all that some phones support.

Many mobile developers and publishers discount wml as old and crufty, which it is, but there's still a considerable amount of traffic being generated by wml-only phones. In the developing world where the mobile provides the only web access for most people, used phones are the norm and more often than not they are wml-only. Even in the US both Sprint/Nextel and ATT still sell new wml-only phones. My Yeswap.com site actually gets more wml traffic than xhtml-mp. Using FeedM8 or Winksite is a painless way to add mobile support including wml to your blog

FeedM8 has some nice features for publishers, you can upload a logo for your pages and a description which appears in Feed9M's site directory. There's even a statistics page where you can track your traffic and ad revenue. Feed9M gives you a halfway decent url too, mine is fdm8.com/wapreview.

Besides being a tool for publishers to create an instant mobile site, FeedM8 is also a mobile portal offering a wide selection of content, in the form of mobilized RSS feeds, from major sites like The Economist, Reuters, Business Week, GigaOm, The Times of India and BoingBoing. Users can bookmark any of these feeds or add their own to create a custom home page.

Ma.gnolia.com is a De.licio.us clone which is to say that it's a bookmarking site that encourages sharing of bookmarks. There are more similarities than differences between the two sites, both use tags to categorize bookmarks and bookmarks are public by default but can be flagged as private. The main differences I see is that Magnolia has a prettier, more Web 2.0'ish Ajaxy user interface.

Ma.gnolia has launched a mobile edition at m.gnolia.com. It allows you to view the most popular bookmarks from all users, your contact's bookmarks or your own bookmarks by tag.

Ma.gnolia has a bookmarklet for one click bookmarking from PC browsers which I've modified it to work with Opera Mini, Netfront and Internet Explorer Mobile. You can find it on the Yeswap Opera Mini Bookmarklets page at o.yeswap.com where there are also instructions on how to install bookmarlets on mobile browsers without having to type them in.

More...

Sept-2009: Ma.gnolia relaunched as Gnolia.com. It's currently invitation only.and as far as I can tell doesn't have a mobile version.

Vehix is a site for car shoppers. The mobile version lets you find new and used cars for sale by zip code with prices and click to call phone numbers. You can also lookup the value of any used car made since 1989. Those features worked well, however digging deeper in the site revealed a lot of non-functioning links. Via: Mike Rowehl - This Is Mobility

Shut down by its owner, Comcast on June 30, 2013

Find homes and busness properties for sale in England. Search by post code or keyword and filter results by price. Listings include a brief description and the price. Once you find a property that interests you the site leaves high and dry. To act on a property you are advised "For more information, refer to property-england.com quoting reference number nnnn" I'd think a proper mobile site of this type should offer a way to contact the listing agent directly like a click to call or click to SMS link.

Now a a private property portfolio for members only.

 

Mideast Youth is a news and opinion blog, published in Bahrain with the goal of connecting young people of all nationalities and regions throughout the region to increase understanding and to promote "human rights, religious freedom, tolerance, and free speech. According to the site's FAQ:

"Our aim is to offer the public what mainstream media constantly lacks - uncensored information, personal anecdotes from underrepresented minorities, highlighting ignored or forgotten human rights abuses, articles that focus on unique and youthful art, music and culture."

No longer a mobile site.

Search for US golf courses by city and state or zip code. Results include address, click to call phone numbers, green fees, and number of holes. There is a link to driving directions from something called Pilot.mobi which did not work, failing with the message "We are experiencing a high volume of searches".

3-Jan-2011 Site is down

Mobile front end to Sync2It, a cross-browser bookmark synchronizer for Windows. Sync2It is a small Windows application that runs in the backround on your PC to monitor and synchronize your IE bookmarks to the cloud.

Your bookmarks can be synchronized across multiple computers running the Sync2it client and are also available online on a password protected web site and on the Sync2It mobile site. 

The mobile site supports folders and adding new bookmarks directly from the mobile browser.  Although Sync2IT is primarily marketed as a PC product you can also use it as a stand alone mobile bookmarking service.  Sync2It is free for unlimited bookmarks and up to three PCs with paid subscription options supporting more computers and https connections. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Offline since Feb-2014

Covers the art business with a database of fine art auction results allowing art buyers and sellers to research fine & decorative art prices online.

Artnet also features a directory of international galleries and articles about artists, galleries, major auctions and art market business trends. 

Artnet uses the Google mobile transcoder to convert major portions of the full Artnet site to mobile fomat. Source: Mobility.mobi

10-Jan-2009 Redirects to mofuse.mobi!

News agregator which collects the top news stories from thousands of sources.  You can view news in any of 26 categories from Art to Video Games or as a blended "Top News" stream.  Listings consist of a headline and excerpt.  You can click through to the original source which is generally NOT mobile friendly.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Feedzilla now provides tools that let publishers and devlopers incorporate feeds into their products and is no longer a general purpose meme tracker.

Visitors guide to Amsterdam from the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions has extensive coverage of attractions, bars, gay and lesbian events and establishments, restaurants, hotels, museums and transportation options with loads of photos and an interactive map. 

Although billed as being usable with all mobile browsers, the site is clearly optimized for advanced devices like the iphone.  Page sizes are over 100 KB and the maps do not display in browsers without JavaScript support.

No longer a mobile web app.

Ezmogo is a mobile web service that lets you search for discount coupons and special offers on services, entertainment, retail stores, restaurants, and more in the U.S. Similar sites include Xtra! Coupons and PocketDeal in the U.S. and  ActiveDeals for India.

There are two ways to find coupons with ezmogo.  You can browse through categories of offerings for your location or you can enter a "Quick Code" found on an ad, flyer or poster. To redeem a coupon just show it displayed on your phone screen at the point of sale.  You don't have to register to use ezmogo but registered users can save coupons for quick access and forward them to friends by text message. Registering requires giving your mobile number to ezmogo.

I think mobile coupons are a viable business model but ezmogo is currently not very useful due to a combination of lack of inventory and user interface limitations.   Without a quick code using this site is an exercise in frustration.  After setting my location to downtown San Francisco, I clicked of each of the 29 shopping categories and sub categories only to be greeted by "there are currently no ads available in your location in this search category" for each one.  Categories need to be hidden if they are empty to avoid leading users "down the garden path" to disappointment.

Parked domain

Angus-Reid is a public opinion research company specializing in politics, public opinion and policy. This site is the mobile version of the company's Global Monitor website which tracks elections around the world and publishes results and analyses of the latest Angus-Reid polls as a resource for  journalists, students, policy makers, and citizens.

20-Jan-2012: Site is down.

A collection of items gathered by Mippin from the RSS feeds of online cycling sites including Road Diaries,
Tour de France Lanterne Rouge and Podium Cafe.

June 2012 Shut Down

View descriptions and photos of Radisson Edwardian luxury hotels in London and Manchester England.  Walking and driving directions for each hotel. There is no online booking or availability information but click to call reservation numbers are provided. Source: Mobility.mobi

Redirects to main Radison site.

The mobile web edition of the London Evening Standard newspaper includes news, sports and business stories. weather forecasts and reviews of restaurants, films, theatre, arts, music and comedy performances. Source Oh! Mobile Directory.

No longer has a mobile friendly version.

Soccer news, scores, player profiles and live match updates. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Site is gone

Online fashion magazine for young women with a "deal of the day" and mobile coupons for brick and mortar clothing retailers. Too bad it's such a slow loading site.  Source Mobility.mobi

Aug-2010 Site is down.

Find properties for sale or lease in Australia.  Listings include photos, price, description and phone number which is not click to call.  Decent site but not being able easily initiate a call to the listing agent is a huge lost oportunity for sellers. Source: Mobility.mobi

Raine & Horne no longer offers a mobile friendly site.

Samsung India's official site has images and specs for current models and a dealer locator. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Site is gone

A good mobile web search site based on the Bing Api.  Unlike m.bing.com, Just.mobi favors made for mobile sites over inferior transcoded desktop ones! Source: Mobility.mobi

All queries return no results

Short headlines for Soccer, Cycling, Motor Sports, Track and Field and Tennis. You will be better off using the Eurosport PDA site which has full stories and works well on most phones. 5/21/05 no longer a wml site - redirects to main eurosport web page. This fine site may be gone - there have been no updates since 3/30/05 and the "Mobility" section of the main Eurosport site now lists only a series of exclusive arangements with a few major European Carriers - users are told to contact these providers to get Eurosport content on their phones.

No longer exists as a F1 specific page - redirects to a general sports news page.

News from Singapore. Has the best Asian News coverage available on wap. No longer available at this address. Still on avantgo so it appears that the url has been changed.

Barebones weather site. Enter a USA zip code and get current conditions. 6-May-06 Too slow to be usable.

Mobile edition of Mike Rohde's weblog. Not a dedicated PDA site but occasionally Mike writes about PDA's.

No longer a mobile site

Formula One News and Results from the UK's largest commercial TV network.

07-May-2009: ITV no longer covers F1 on their mobile site.

Lonely Planet publishes a series of guidebooks originally aimed at low budget and and adventure travelers but lately trying to appeal to everyone. This site highlights excerts from the guide books with a different city profiled every day plus a world guide with short lists of must see sites in each country. Update: 3/31/2006, Lonely Planet no longer has a mobile site.

Announcements of upcomming events of the San Francisco based Mobile Computing Special Interest Group of California.

Dead 7/25/2006

News, forums, product information and release announments. Daily Updates. Not really a mobile site although usable on PDA's.

Redirects to a "coming soon" page for a site called "Xxtremely Mobile".

Chat group site. Upoc is an SMS text messaging based chat site. When you join a Upoc chat group you will receive an SMS of every post that other members make to the group. You can post by SMS WAP, the web or by texting into a landline phone. If you don't want to receive SMS's, register for upoc on the web and check the box "I do not have a mobile phone" You can still read the messages via the Web or WAP

30-Nov-2011 Upoc shut down.

The Economist is a highly-regarded British weekly newsmagazine with an emphasis on political and economic analysis of cuurent events. Update 05/31/05: All of the articles are now "premium" content and you will not be able to read them through this link.

User Forums, Game, Wallpaper and Ringtone downloads, WAP link directory. New forums, not many posts yet.
Down 11/26/2007

IYHY is another relatively new service that promises to make most web pages viewable on mobile phone browsers. It doesn't break up large pages and many web sites are too large to be loaded on phone browsers. I can get to the IYHY homepage with all my test browsers except one (Sony-Ericsson). The screen is hard to use because the site overrides the browser's default fonts making them too small for easy readability. Horizontal scrolling is required to see the entire logo and text box on a small 128 x 160px phone screen.

If I enter the url of this blog in IYHY, I get either a browser hang (Nokia) or crash (Motorola) or an error 'insufficient memory for this operation' on Openwave which means the page is over that device's maximum page size of 10KB).

I was able to load the homepage of Southwest Airlines's full PC site on the Nokia, Motorola and Openwave simulators. But when I click the "Book Travel" button I get an error (Page too large on the Nokia and Openwave, "page cannot be loaded on the Motorola). Even using The Access Netfront mobile emulator, "full web" browser, I cannot complete the reservation - when I click the "Book Travel" button, IYHY redirects me to the full Southwest web page which is unusable on almost any phone. IYHY also strips out all of a site's images, colors and even simple formating like bold and italic. At least IYHY is fast and seems to be reliable.

Dec-2010: Site is down.

New York business newspaper's mobile edition.

7-Jul-08: No Content!

I'm trying out YoMoBlog, a very cool mobile blogging tool from Dave Winer. It works with lots of blogging platforms including WordPress and Type Pad. As it's mobile web based with a page size of only 7kb, it's compatable with most phones.

YoMoBlog really shines when used with a device with a QWERTY keyboard. I wrote and posted the lead paragraph of this item with my Moto i855 but not being a demon texter I wouldn't want to write more than a few lines with a phone keypad.

To get started with YoMoBlog, head first to yomoblog.com/startup to register. Registration consists of entering your blog's url, an email address and an existing login and passsword to your blog. Once your registered you log into yomoblog.com, type your post, hit submit and you've posted to your blog. It couldn't be simpler. YoMoBlog even lets you tag your mobile post with any of the categories you've set up on your blog. There is no draft mode, so what ever you've keyed gets posted immediately.

YoMoBlog is easy to setup and use but If you get stuck there's on-line help and a Yahoo Group, blackberry-bloggers

.

 

I like YoMoBlog. The interface is clean and intuitive and it seems to be compatable with most blog software and devices.

Gone, domain is now a realtor's site. Apr-2010

Silicon Valley gossip blog - reformatted for mobile by FeedM8.

Valleywag has been folded into Gawker and nolonger has a stanalone mobile or desktop site.

San Jose Mercury News Silicon Valley's hometown paper - full content in lightweight text-only format.

Down 31-May-2007 Stories are blank!

Social bookmarking using del.icio.us and similar sites is huge on the web and I think it's about to really take off on the mobile web too. Surfing, bookmarking and sharing your bookmarks doesn't require intensive keying, so it works as well on the mobile web as it does on the full web. I'd go so far as to say that social bookmarking has the potential to become as become as big as sharing ringtones and photos.

A great way to do mobile social bookmarking is with the Opera Mini bookmarklets I recently posted about (and which are working again , BTW) but it's not the only way. I've been looking at a new site that takes a server based approach. Putting the bookmarking functionality on the server means you can use any browser - good news for the millions of users (including all Verizon and Alltel customers) whose phones can't run Opera Mini.

The free service, called Mobleo lets you create a directory of your favorite mobile and non-mobile websites. You can setup your bookmarks on the web at mobleo.net and access them from your phone at mobile.mobleo.net . Lots of sites let you do that but what sets Mobleo apart is that you can dispense with the PC and save bookmarks directly from your mobile browser. As you surf the web with Mobleo you are actually going through a transcoding proxy which adds a form to the bottom of every page with an Enter tags field and a Tag Page button. You can instantly bookmark any page you land on. The proxy also transcodes non-mobile websites to a more mobile friendly format. Mobleo's transcoder doesn't resize images but you can tell it not to display them. There is even a link on every page that lets you jump out of the transcoder and view the page in its original format. The whole thing reminds me of a concept Charlie Schick proposed half a year ago in A website, wrapped in a transcoder, inside a browser .

Mobleo's PC site lets manage your bookmarks and fine tune the transcoder. You can delete and rename bookmarks and for each bookmark you can specify whether you want the linked site transcoded or not and whether the transcoded pages should include images.

There's no bookmark management on the mobile site, you can only add bookmarks - you can't delete, rename or change their tags. You can however, register for Mobleo on the mobile site which features the first mobile captcha I've seen. The lack of mobile editing facilities keeps Mobleo from being a service that doesn't require a PC to use to it's fullest. While personal computers are ubiquitous in the US, worldwide mobile browsers outnumber PC's by 10 to 1 and are often a user's only way to access the web. I'd like to see more mobile services that don't require a PC to use their main features.

The thing that keeps me from using Mobleo all the time is that the transcoder can't handle some of my favorite sites. I haven't been able to login to Google Reader or Bloglines using Mobleo and those are the sites where I most often want to bookmark something. When Mobleo can't open a page you still have the option to view the page in its native format although you can't bookmark pages viewed in native format. Sites that don't require a login generally work well. Mobleo is a beta (launched in November) with some beta bugs but it's a great start which will surely improve with time. Writing transcoders that work with any site and browser is obviously very difficult - in my use, even Google's transcoder fails with an error message about 10% of the time.

It doesn't seem possible to search or view other users public links by tag on Mobleo like you can on del.icio.us. Maybe I'm missing something as the About page speaks of sharing your links with "...the Mobleo community" but I can't figure out how to do it. I can only see the tags of friends who have explicitly shared theirs with me - not everyone's public tags. What makes the buzz on a social bookmarking site is the ability to discover what the community is giving it's link love to. Public bookmarks provide a great pool of searchable data that Del.icio.us leverages with their hotlist , what's popular and fresh only filters. I'd like to see Mobleo do something similar.

Even in it's beta state Mobleo is a great mobile bookmark site, you can set up mobile bookmarks on the PC or phone, assign tags to them and share your favorites with friends. The phone GUI is easy to use. Switching from one tag to another on the phone is convenient using a dropdown list at the top of every bookmark page.

Mobleo, which was created entirely by developer, Tom Boilard in his spare time is more attractive and polished than the sites of many well-funded startups. It's a great showcase for the mobile social bookmarking concept.

29-Apr-2013: Site is down.

A news site and discussion forum for users of Motorola's "Q" Windows Mobile CDMA (and soon GSM too) smartphone.

Dec-2009: Site down

Local News from Hawaii.

Merged with the Honolulu Star Bulletin to become the Honolulu Star Advertiser

Save2Phone (wap.save2phone.com/myzus/mobile/) has over 2000 downloadable freeware, shareware and demo  mobile applications and games for Java, Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile phones. The mobile site is slow, hard to navigate and there are no descriptions of the files only filenames. The best way to use this site is to first visit the desktop edition of Save2Phone at www.save2phone.com which also slow but is better organized and has descriptions of the files.  The files on the PC site all have a numeric code which can be entered on the mobile site to download the file.
Down 15-Mar-2008

Avvenu, which was recently acquired by Nokia, is similar to SoonR (review) in that both provide remote web access to files on a desktop PC from a phone or another PC. I'm a satisfied SoonR user, is Avvenu good enough to switch?

To use Avvenu, you start off by installing the Avvenu client program, which runs all the time in the background, on the PC (Windows XP and Vista only). Then, when you log into Avvenu's mobile (https://mobile.avvenu.com) or PC site (https://www.avvenu.com) with a phone or another PC you're able to browse the remote PC's entire file system and download files. You can also share files with another user - Avvenu emails them a link granting time-limited, read-only access to specific files. Avvenu doesn't allow sharing audio or video files, however. If Google Desktop search is installed on the PC, Avvenu integrates with it letting you search the PC for files. You can upload files to the PC from another PC or a mobile device that supports file uploads from the browser - like Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. Or you can upload to a single pre-configured folder using MMS with almost any phone.

More...

Nokia has shut down Avvenu and migrated user files to files.ovi.com

The LolCat phenomenon shows no signs of dying out. If you're like me and get a chuckle out of cat pictures with humorous captions in broken English, Hawt Lolz! is the site for you. It has a seemingly endless supply of mobile sized lolcats, one to a page.

Site is gone

The official site of the 2008 games Beijing2008.cn has a mobile edition in English at wap.beijing2008.cn/pams/s.do?p=507&lo=en.  It's a one size fits all wml site but is quite comprehensive with news, schedules and free wallpaper downloads for each sport. The 96x128 wallpapers feature the 2008 Olympic mascots, five good luck dolls. This should be a particularly good site if you are lucky enough to actually be in China for the Olympics as it has maps of the Oympic cities and venues, visitor guides, hotel information and a downloadable GPS enabled Olympics Navigation application (Windows Mobile only).

Down - 17-Oct-2008.

I got an email from Mark at Idea Earth suggesting I take a look at the mobile sites they have developed. Idea Earth's got a boatload of sites, but one jumped out at me as especially interesting and unusual was FbiMostWanted.mobi. It's just what the name suggests, a mobile version of the famous Federal Bureau of Investigation's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List. The list has been around for almost 60 years and every American has no doubt seen the hard copy version of prominently displayed in Post Offices around the country. These days is online as well but the FBI hasn't had the foresight to create a mobile friendly version creating an opportunity which Idea Earth has taken the initiative to fill.

The FBI has supplemented the original 10 Most Wanted list with additional lists of the Most Wanted Terrorists, Most Wanted Sexual Predators, Most Wanted Murders, Most Wanted Robbers and Most Wanted Drug Conspirators and FbiMostWanted.mobi has all the lists too. The site also has links to the FBI's online form for reporting a fugitive and to a list of FBI offices. These links are not mobile friendly. It would be nice if Idea Earth linked to non-mobile sites through a transcoder like Mowser, Skweezer or Google's GWT There's also a click to call link to 911, just be careful you don't accidenly click it! Just a remainder, but if you ever do accidently call 911, stay on the line until the emergency operator answers and explain that you dialed 911 accidentally, otherwise you could wind up surrounded by emergency vehicles and possibly a fine for a false report.

FBIMostWanted.mobi was created with the free mobile site builder MobileSiteGalore which goes to show you that you don't need a big budget or impressive technical skills to create a compelling and useful mobile site.

Parked Domain

The mobile edition of Article99.com Authors Club, a site where people who want to promote their business, website or reputation as a subject matter expert submit articles on any topic, a practice called Article Marketing.  There are actually dozens of Article Marketing sites on the web but this is the first  one I've seen that has a mobile edition. Article submission is free on Article99

As you might expect on a site dedicated to self promotion the quality of these articles tends to be pretty low,  but some of the articles are reasonably well written and useful.  Article99 has some fairly specific content and style gudelines and appears to moderate submissions to weed out the trash. There are over 20 thousand articles grouped into a couple of dozen main categories and over 450 sub-categories.  You can find anything from  dog training tutorials to web design tips on Article99. Unfortunately the Google powered site search doesn't seem to work making the site more suited to browsing than searching for anything specific.  Considering the quanity of content, Article99 is reasonably usable on a mobile thanks to the use of accesskeys and the hierarchical organization.

20-Nov-2010 Site is down

A one page mobile summary of international soceer football news and results. There about a dozen headlines and brief story blurbs on the page. Available English, French, German and Spanish.

Site is gone

A fan site covering the Premiere League, England's top professional football organization. The site is a mashup of newsfeeds from the BBC, Sky and 4TheGame, current standings and links to external sites including some of the teams' own mobile sites. Source: Mobility.mobi

Parked domain

Soccer football news, results, betting tips and links to livescore.com for the latest scores.

3-Jan-2011 Domain lapsed

From Perham, Minesota, the text-only mobile edition of the Enterprise Bulletin offers local news, weather, business and classifieds. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Feb-2010: Mobile version is no longer offered.

Travelers guide to Hong Kong with sightseeing, shopping and dinning listings and recommendations, an event calendar, directory of useful numbers and local weather forecast. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

No longer has a mobile formatted or responsive site.

 

Unofficial directory of BBC Radio streams in Real Media and Windows Media formats.

Parked domain

Twittme is another mobile Twitter front end. One thing that sets Twittme apart from the rest is that it that allows creating Tweets longer than 140 characters.  The "What are you doing" field in Twittme accepts up to 240 characters.  Tweets longer than 140 are sent as two successive Tweets.  Several desktop clients do this but Twittme is the first mobile web one I've seen that does. Twittme has a couple of other features that set it apart from the crowd, there are links under each tweet in the the timeline that let you share it on Facebook or by Email.

Initially, Tweetme was missing a few features found in the best of other mobile clients but it's added support for OAuth and made Twitter @IDs and #hashtags in the body of Tweets clickable links. I often click on IDs, especially in retweets.  It's the main way I discover new people to follow. Being able to click hashtags is also a big plus as it's a great way to follow live events and to see what others are saying on  a topic.

21-Sep-2012 Redirects to a makeup artist site!

 

Springpad is an online organizer app based on linked notepads called "Springpads".  Each Springpad can contain notes, recipes, todo lists and calendar events. Springpads can be linked to other Springpads and can be shared with other Springpad users. Source Tappity

Springpad no loger has a mobile webapp.

Jay Montano's My Nokia Blog is one of my favorite Nokia specific sites. Covering Symbian and Maemo and updated daily the site is full of tips for making the most of your Nokia smartphone. There are also reviews of the newest Nokias with plenty of quality photos and videos and a catalog of free apps, games and themes.

As a WordPress.org site, My Nokia Blog benefits from WordPress' built in mobile support which detects mobile devices and delivers a couple of different mobile formated themes, one for touch devices and one for non-touch.

Apr-2012 - no loger has a mobile version

Canadian cable TV sports chanel, The Score's mobile site has an unusual design with an auto-refreshing front  page that displays the latest live scores for a specific sport.  For the Olympics, The Score has built a page dedicated to Canada's nation sport, hockey.  It will provide full, in-game coverage of men’s and women’s hockey along with medal standings, hockey tournament standings, men’s hockey stat leaders, and news updates from all Olympic events.

Dec-2010: Page has been removed.

 

A different sort of World Cup mobile site from BP (yes that BP).  Rather than scores, standings and live coverage, it has extensive background information, star players, trivial and local lingo for the 9 FIFA top ranked and 6 African teams in the World Cup along with lots of free downloadable audio clips and ring-tones of the countries' national anthems, chants, cheers, songs.  There is also a directory of 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ official FIFA Fan Fests, where fans without tickets can watch the matches televised on a giant screen, a BP station search and gas saving driving tips. Source: Mobility.mobi

Site has shut down.

Online mobile edition of UK based Heat magazine, a celebrity, entertainment and gossip print weekly. The mobile site includes lots of celeb photos and trivia contests with DVDs and gadgets as prizes. Source: Taptu Touch Web Report (PDF).

Apr-2013: Heatworld's mobile edition is no more

Usually a good source of F! news but currently throwing errors on most pages. Down for good: 3/18/2006

Public service site Buckle Up!, promotes seat belt usage with a debunking of seat belt myths like "I'd rather be thrown clear in a crash" and a selection of scary crash videos. Source: Mobile Mammoth

May-2013 Domain expired

Major mobile industry news and opinion site. Ceased publication June 2005.

Flight schedules, flight availability, flight status, my itineraries, frequent flyer balance.

Continental was acquired by United Airlines and no longer has its own Web presence.

Current conditions and 9 day forecast for any US zip code. Must reenter zip every visit.

Sown 29-May-2007

Browser test suite for WAP developers. Ringtone, wallpaper and game downloads for everyone.

Down 03-Oct-2008 - The site displays this message "Well after more than 7 years of activity and fun, have I decided to close down my wap test pages etc. since it do not any more have my attention."

All About Palm is a brand new site from Ewan Spence creator of All About Symbian and All About N-Gage. The site features hardware and software reviews and Ewan's opinion pieces about the Palm Smartphone future.

26-Jul-2007 Publication of All About {alm has been suspended.

Game, ringtone and image downloads and a small forum. Emphasis is on media for Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones.

5/5/2006 Gone, it just redirects to a commercial ringtone site.

Use your del.icio.us links on yor mobile. Mobilicio.us is a mash up of del.icio.us with Google's Mobile Transcoder. After logging in with your del.icio.us id and password, you can enter a tag and get a list of all your links with that tag. Click a link and it's converted to xhtml-mobile by Google.

31-Oct-2010 Site is down

Top stories in new, business, sports and entertainment from the New York City daily. Well designed and attractive WAP2 site keeps page size down to about 4KB with a few small images of less than 110px in width should work on almost any phone.

No longer has a mobile or responsive site.

The UK edition of The History Channel has launched a mobile site featuring their broadcast calendar with promotional descriptions of upcoming shows and a This Day in Historyy feature.

No longer a mobile or responsive site.

Another mobile transcoder. I don't use these much anymore since the advent of Opera Mini but new ones keep popping up. Anyway BareSite strips out most styles and formatting, even bold and italic, giving a basic black on white text-only page. You can turn on images from a preferences page. But 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. BareSite is new, so give it time, but for now Google, Mowser and Skweezer are better choices for mobile transcoding. Via Access on Main Street

Feb-2013: Parked domain

Gay.com (gaycom.opnr.com) Lifestyle magazine for gays and lesbians. Travel articles, entertainment reviews and news. Pinup wallpapers and videos for purchase.

Site and domain are gone.

:bMarks (bmarks.mobi/) is pretty much a pure Digg clone, the :bMarks equivalents of Digg and Bury are Bump and Dump and like Digg you can leave comments on listings. Sites are displayed by number of Bumps in the past 1, 7, 30 or 365 days and the results can be filtered to only show sites in specific categories. :bMarks users seem to post breaking news stories from mobile news sites quite a bit.

 

:bMarks supplies an Opera Mini Bookmarket which can be downloaded from the site directly to your phone. Full instructions are provided. The bookmarklet not only passes the url and name of the current page but also the description meta tag, if the site has one, which is cool because it fills in the description field for the site on :bMarks. Unfortunately, the :bMarks bookmarket is too long to work in Opera Mini on some browsers including my Motorola 1855. That phone's Java implementation limits text fields to 250 characters. I've edited the :bMarks bookmarklet by removing the description to make it small enough to work on my phone and others with similar limits. Both versions are posted on o.yeswap.com ready for you to download into Opera Mini or Mobile IE.

 

June-2010: Parked Page

JiWire Wi-Fi Finder (iphone.jiwire.com/) Is a worldwide free hotspot finder with listings for over 200,000 hotspots in 135 countries. You can restrict the search to free hotspots only or search for both free and pay locations. Officially this is an iPhone web app but it works beautifully on Opera Mini. It's usable in Nokia's Webkit browser although the bottom half of the last listing on each page is cut off.. The built-in Openwave browser on my Motorola i855 can load all of the site except for one image but searches fail with a "Malformed URL" error.

Aug-2010 - The mobile site has been replaced with an iPhone only app and the full site is unusable even with the Android browser.