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Category Archives: Mobile News and Reviews
Mobile Site Mini Review - New Mobile News Blog - Mobile 360
I just discovered yet another mobile tech news site Mobile360.com, which launched around May of last year. It's London based and appears to share ownership with the well established German language site mobile360.de.
General mobile news is a crowded and competitive world but Mobile360 seems to have hit the ground running with frequent updates, well researched and well written items and an attractive site design. They apparently have some journalistic chops too. I discovered Mobile360 because they were the first to break the story that Nokia's Navtech was shutting down their developer program with only a few days notice to their partners.
The mobile edition has all of Mobile 360's editorial content, including videos, and does a nice job of maintaining the full site's look and branding. It seems to work well with everything from the Android and iOS browsers to the more capable feature phone browsers. JavaScript is used but isn't required. Mobile browsers should be served the mobile template automatically but it can be forced in any browser with mobile360.com/?mobile=1.
Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Tech/Mobile/News - Reviews
Ratings: Content 
Usability 
Mobile Link: mobile360.com
Mobile Site Mini Review - @JebBrilliant's "The Mobile Perspective"
Formerly aBrilliantBlog, this is @JebBrilliant's blog on all things mobile. Jeb is the community manager for Phone.com and also runs a trade show and events production company.
At The Mobile Perspective, Jeb covers mobile services, VOIP, social networking and devices. Content includes reviews, news and opinion pieces as well as video interviews with industry executives and major players.
Jeb uses WordPress Mobile Pack to deliver a small footprint, quick loading version of the site to all mobile browsers. Unfortunately, the mobile version doesn't include the site's many videos. These are mostly interviews with industry executives and developers and are generally quite good.
Fortunately there is a working "Switch to our desktop site" link at the bottom of each mobile page. The videos on the desktop site are hosted on YouTube and work well on an Android phone. On a Nokia N8, the videos worked when opened from Opera Mini or Opera Mobile, but they did not work in the Symbian browser.
Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Tech/Mobile/News - Reviews
Ratings: Content Usability
Ready.mobi Score: 5 "Good"
Mobile Link: themobileperspective.com
Posted in Mobile News and Reviews
Tagged Android, mobile site review, Symbian, WPMP, YouTube
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Mobile Site Quick Take: Mobile Europe
New to me, but Mobile Europe has apparently been around for 14 years as a controlled circulation (meaning it's distributed for free to industry professionals) print magazine covering the mobile telecoms industry with a euro-centric focus. It also has a website and this mobile website.
I don't normally give much shrift to these sorts of indusry rags, which tend to be mostly cut and pasted press releases. But two things caught my eye about Mobile Europe. For one, the content is actually interesting with timely, well written articles and opinion pieces tracking industry news. They aren't afraid to bite the hand that feeds them either judging by comments like this one about Carrier IQ "Why is the application “hidden” on the phone, and hard to remove? Should there be a level of opt-in, as with location data on other apps, for example?"
The other thing I like about Mobile Europe is the mobile site design. It's a one size fits all affair that manages to strike a nice balance between looking modern and graphically interesting in the decent browsers on Android, iOS, etc. yet was still responsive and usable in the legacy Openwave browser of a low end feature phone I tried it on.
Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Tech/Mobile/News - Reviews
Ratings: Content Usability
Mobile Link: m.mobileeurope.co.uk
IntoMobile is Now Mobile Optimized
IntoMobile has long been one of my favorite mobile news blogs. Martin Perez and team do a great job of covering the latest in mobile hardware, software, services and industry news. Their hard work and timely, quality content have made IntoMobile one of the top mobile news sites with over 3.5 million monthly unique visitors, according to Google Analytics.
But a mobile version of Intomobile has been a bit of an off and on affair. There was one m.intomobile.com that launched in 2008. It was generated from IntoMobile's RSS feed using Mofuse.com. For reasons unknown it eventually disappeared leaving IntoMobile with no mobile friendly version.
But today when I followed a link from Twitter to an IntoMobile story in Opera Mini I was greetted by a new mobile version of IntoMobile built using MobStac. Browser detection is used to redirect mobile visitors to IntoMobile pages to the corresponding mobile version of the same page. You can also view the mobile version in any browser by going to intomobile.mobstac.com.
MobStac is a freemium service that generates mobile views of WordPress, Blogger, Drupal and Joomla sites. It allows designers considerable control over the content and appearance of the mobilized site and claims to support over 5,000 devices from basic feature phones to the iPad.
I tried IntoMobile with the Android 2.2, Symbian Anna and Opera Mini 6.1 browsers and with a Myriad WAP browser on a Motorola prepaid feature phone. It generally worked well athough there were a few issues. In all the browsers the link to view a post's comments did not work. The Myriad browser wasn't recognized as mobile and got the desktop site by default which didn't work at all. Once I forced the mobile edition by visiting intomobile.mobstac.com the site loaded quickly and looked great even in this very limited browser.
MobStac resizes images and paginates longer posts to reduce page size for basic browsers. However, Mobstac paginates content for Opera Mini, which is unecessary, as Mini can handle very large pages, and slows browsing. There's a "Single Page" button which presumably is supposed to show the entire post as a single page but it didn't seem to work. There also a "Desktop Version" link that works although it takes you back to the IntoMobile desktop homepage rather than to the desktop version of the mobile page you were viewing.
It's nice to have a mobile optimized version of IntoMobile again even if it is a little qlitchy. As it's brand new and is still probably being shaken down I have hope that the issues with comments, Opera Mini pagination and Myriad browser detection will be quickly fixed.
Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Tech/Mobile/News - Reviews
Ratings: Content Usability
Mobile Link: intomobile.mobstac.com/
