Welcome to Found on the Mobile Web, a semi-regular feature at WapReview where I list, describe and link to sites recently added to the WapReview Mobile Directory and YesWap.mobi mobile portal. With these latest additions the directory and portal now contain 1251 mobile sites.
Football.365 (f365-za.com/w/f365m) South African based football (soccer) news site recommended by Naiyer of oh.dirlink.mobi
The site covers the sport around the world with news, results and columns. There are dedicated news pages for the English Premiership League, World Cup, each team in the Premiere Division of South Africa’s PSL and the sport in Cameroon, Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Football.365 is launching a mobile chat room dedicated to “The Beautiful Game” latter this month.
CricketNext (wap.cricketnext.com) is a very complete cricket site with news, results, photos, video downloads, trivia, rankings, polls and a blog on the sport. The site is targeted toward smartphones with a page size of 65KB including images. The dozen videos, all of which seem to be of interviews rather than matches, are 176x144px, use H.263/AMR codecs and range from 164KB to almost 3MB in size
Bunkers.mobi, Lets you 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”. Source: Mobility.mobi
Entertainment/Mobile Video-Audio
The Minsode Network (mini.4sony.mobi) is a new site from Sony Picures which offers free streaming mini episodes from classic TV shows including Voltron, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Diff’rent Strokes, Fat Albert, He-Man, Rescue Me: Originals, Spider-man the Animated Series, Married with Children and She-Ra. The videos are about five minutes long and are in 176x144px MPEG4 video/AMR audio format which should work on virtually all video capable phones, providing your provider hasn’t blocked streaming. Source: Mobility.mobi
Universal Pictures has launched this mobile site at universalpictures.mobi to promote current and upcoming movie releases. Six films are featured in the latest edition with cast list, plot synopsis, photo gallery and video trailers. The trailers are the best part. They are delivered in at least tqw different formats 176×144 and 240X320 depending on what your phone supports. This is one of the few mainstream sites that provides videos in the highest quality my Nokia N95-3 can display, 240x320px using the H.264 video and AAC audio codecs. The trailers I watched were very impressive in both audio and video quality. The 2 to 3 minute trailers run 4 to 5 MB in size.
Kotaku (m.kotaku.com) is Gawker Network’s video game news blog. The site covers PC, console and mobile gaming with reviews, product announcements and industry news.
News/US Local By State/Minnesota -New Jersey
St Louis Beacon (stlbeacon.org/mobile) A well rounded local news site from the St Louis Missouri daily paper. Severl dozen, full length articles from the paper’s Issues, Politics, Health, Science, Arts + Life and Voices sections. Page size may be too large for the browsers on some phones.
News/International/Middle East
Mideast Youth (mideastyouth.com/?mobi) 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.”
Arabian Business (arabianbusiness.com/pda) The mobile edition of a major Middle-Eastern Business News site. Hundreds of stories, updated frequently. The site is organized by industry with sections for banking, construction, energy, real estate, technology and more.
Article99 (mobi.article99.com) is 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 them 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. Source: Tappity