Mobile Web News and Reviews

The Symbian Blog Goes Mobile With A New WordPress Plugin

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on January 6, 2009

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The Symbian Blog - Homepage I recently found Vaibhav Sharma's site, The Symbian Blog. The name is a little misleading as focus of the site seems to be mainly Nokia and S60 rather than Symbian as a whole. There's very little about UIQ and MOAP. But I suppose that's OK as those platforms are likely to soon become history and Symbian will become a synonym for S60.

The site is updated daily and features product announcements, hardware and software reviews and tips for getting the most of your S60 phone. It's not pure Symbian boosterism either. Vaibhav doesn't hesitate to take S60 and Nokia to task in the areas where they deserve it; like the slow, convoluted and unreliable Nokia Software Update application or that the N96 is in many ways a step backward compared to the N95. I'm really enjoying The Symbian Blog, it's timely, nicely designed, well written and makes good use of images and videos. A worthy addition to the ranks of S60 news and review sites.

The Symbian Blog just launched a mobile edition using a new mobile WordPress Plugin called MobilePress. MobilePress does what Alex King and Andy Moore's plugins do which is to detect mobile devices and deliver the full content of your blog in a stripped down, single column format. But MobilePress adds a few tricks. First it supports themes using the same structure as regular WordPress themes. There don't seem to be any custom MobilePress themes yet but I'm sure there will be soon. Another nice thing that MobilePress does is to support different themes for specific devices. You can have four themes. One each for the iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows Mobile and a generic theme for everything else. You can also tell MobilePress to deliver the default PC version of your blog to one or more of the three non-generic platforms.

One thing MobilePress doesn't do which I think is really needed in a true mobile plugin is to split pages and re-size images to control page weight. To be fair the other WordPress mobile plugins don't either but it's still a problem that needs to be solved. As it stands, The Symbian Blog's pages average about 40 KB, too large for feature phones using the Openwave and Motorola Browsers. Other than that MobilePress looks quite promising, I'll try to set it up on a test site and share my impressions.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology/Mobile/Smartphones/Symbian

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: thesymbianblog.com

Ready.mobi score: 2 "bad"

Metro - User Generated Video Revenue Sharing

Published

Dennis Bournique

on January 5, 2009

in News Sites

. 0 Comments

Metro a free print newspaper distributed on public transit systems in the UK. In the nine years since its launch, Metro has become the fourth largest paper in the country with over a million daily readers. Metro is also on the web at metro.co.uk and on the mobile web at metro.mobi.

The most interesting thing about Metro is its video section, MEviews. The video content costs 50p a clip to download and it's all user generated. While this sounds like a bit of a rip-off, especially given that the same videos are available on the full-web Metro site for free, it's not as bad as it sounds. Metro is sharing some of that revenue with content creators. If you upload a video to Metro, you get 15p every time its viewed on a mobile. The idea is not actually new, mobile network 3 did something very similar in 2005 with its See Me TV which eventually turned into EyeVibe and is now available on both 3 and O2. EyeVibe's videos are cheaper to download at 10p each, but only share a meager 1p per download with the creator. I wonder if EyeVibe uploders are switching to MEview for the higher payout?

The user generated content and revenue sharing aspect of Metro is probably the most interesting thing about the site, but Metro.mobi is also a pretty good general news site. It's quite well designed and makes extensive use of adaptation, varying page and image sizes and markup language, to deliver an optimal experience to any phone from ancient wml-only devices to the iPhone. Content is strong on sports and celebrity gosip but there is hard news as well. Metro carries about 50 full-length news articles on the site at any given time, most include photos. Source: OK OK

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - News/International/Europe

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: metro.mobi

Ready.mobi score: 3 "fair"

FriendFeed To Go

Published

Dennis Bournique

on January 4, 2009

in Mobile Social

. 0 Comments

It's not new, but I just discovered this mobile FriendFeed client. It's called FFtoGo and the mobile URL is fftogo.com. It wasn't developed by FriendFeed but is the creation of Benjamin Golub. He was later hired by FriendFeed but FFtoGo remains independent. The code for FFtoGo is open source, there's even a link to the source repository at the bottom of each FFtoGo page.

If you aren't familiar with FriendFeed (FF), it's a service that lets you roll up the various aspects of your online persona into a single web page and feed. You point FF at your blog and your accounts on Twitter, Jaiku, Flicker, Facebook, YouTube, etc. FF can bring in content from 59 services in all. It aggregates all your posts and updates from the various services and makes them available on a web page (mine is friendfeed.com/yeswap) and as a RSS feed, Facebook application, iGoogle Widget, email feed and an iPhone web app.

FFtoGo is a faithful reproduction of the FriendFeed web experience but reformatted for mobile usability with smaller page size and numeric access keys that let you jump to menu items with a single key press. It's highly configurable using a Settings menu. You can control the number of items per page, whether to display images and if external links should be mobilized using the Google transcoder. It's a good thing the items per page option is available. The default of 30 items results in a page size of 44 KB, too large for many feature phones. The low Ready.mobi score is due almost entirely to the page size issue. I'd like to see FFtoGo default to 10 items or less to make it compatible with more handsets.

Another FriendFeed mobile option is the official FriendFeed iPhone web app at friendfeed.com/iphone. Unlike many iPhone sites, FriendFeed's works in other "full web" mobile browsers as long as they can handle its 250 KB page size. The iPhone site quite usable in S60WebKit, although a bit of horizontal scrolling is required, but really shines in Opera Mini's "Fit-to-width" Mobile View. I actually prefer the iPhone app over FFtoGo in both WebKit and Opera Mini (bottom image) because you can log into it with your FriendFeed password. Because FFtoGo is a third party application, it requires the use of your unwieldy and very mobile unfriendly 12 character, alphanumeric FriendFeed "Remote Key".

With FFtoGo creator Benjamin Golub now at FriendFeed, I'm hoping we will see the release of a lighter weight official mobile version that works with all mobile browsers and does away with the need for the mobile key. Source: mjelly

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology/Mobile/Mobile Social

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: fftogo.com

Ready.mobi score: 2 "bad"

Carnival of the Mobilists #155

Published

Dennis Bournique

on January 4, 2009

in Carnival of the Mobilists

. 0 Comments

Photo: Carnival Mandala by Carf Some Rights Reserved

I've missed the Carnival of the Mobilists during its annual holiday break the last few weeks. This week it's back with bells on, hosted by Helen Keegan on her blog, Musings of a mobile marketer. This, the first Carnival of the new year, contains a number of posts looking back at 2008 and offering predictions for 2009's mobile future. There are also pieces on mobile marketing, development, business, hardware and software. A very good collection of posts and something for everyone. Don't miss it. Link: Carnival of the Mobilists #155

Next week's Carnival will be right here at wapreview.com. It's open to anyone writing online about mobile. Email entries to mobilists at gmail dot com by 12 Midnight, Friday, Jan 10th US Pacific Time (GMT - 8:00). For more information visit the Carnival homepage at mobili.st