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 witting about DW-WORLD unless they had an interesting 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.

I’ve added DW-World to the News/International section of YesWAP.com.

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

I’ve added the DW-World Cup page to YesWAP’s Sports/World Cup page.

DW-World: xhtml-mp
Content:  Usability:

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Speaking of the World Cup, Steve Litchfield at AllAboutSymbian has noticed that Opera has released a special World Cup edition of Opera Mini which launches on its own World Cup themed homepage. I’m I big fan of Opera Mini and recommend it highly. If your phone supports Mini and your not using it you should really give it a try, it’s truly amazing. However there are still quite a few phones it doesn’t run on. The Opera Mini World Cup homepage however, is accessible by any browser at http://my.opera.com/community/goal/. The best thing about the Opera WC page is that it displays live scores of all the matches as the first thing at the top on the page. You can just keep refreshing and see the current scores without having to scroll down to them after each refresh. One thing to watch out for is that the links on the Mini page are to full size web sites, not mobile ones – so if your not using Opera Mini you probably shouldn’t try following the links unless you want to hang your browser and run up big data charges.