New Sites By Wap Review Readers

A couple of regular Wap Review readers contacted me this week to announce new mobile sites they have created. I don’t automatically post about every personal site that I hear about but these are quality sites offering unique content so I’m more than willing to add them to the directory and portal and give them a little plug.

First up is Ryan Kairer whose PhoneFavs and Palm InfoCenter I’ve covered previously. The prolific Ryan has just launched three new mobile (and web) sites, Mobility Beat, Tech News Tube and Mac Hash. They are all tech news agregators and share the same template and architecture but each has a different focus.

Mobility Beat (m.mobilitybeat.com) gathers the latest mobile industry and handset news from several dozen sites including All About Symbian, Phone Scoop, Engadget Mobile, Gizmodo, jkOnTheRun, MobileBurn and many lesser known blogs including Wap Review. The site’s attractive front page lists the title of each item together with the site’s logo. Items posted in the last hour are marked with a blue dot. You can filter the items to include only a articles covering a specific topic like “Android” or “Windows Mobile“.

Clicking a headline leads to a summary page which has options to go to the full article on the site where it was published, view a mobilized version or add the item as a social bookmark on PhonFavs. MobilitBeat uses PhoneFav’s own transcoder which is fairly basic. It does a good job of reformatting pages as a single column but does not split large pages or resize images. Mobilized pages from image heavy sites like TechCrunch may be too large to load on phones with basic Wap browsers. My suggestion to anyone building a site like this, is to use Google’s transcoder rather than rolling your own. Google’s works, it’s free and Google doesn’t seem to mind.

Tech News Tube (m.technewstube.com) shares the same basic design and features as MobilityBeat but it’s TOPIC is general tech news and its sources are the usual suspects like Ars Technica, Digg, Engadget, GigaOM, Gizmodo, Slashdot, The Register, Tom’s Hardware and VentureBeat.

Mac Hash (m.machash.com) Is all things Apple, with the freshest stories pulled from the Apple Faithful’s favorite sites: AppleInsider, iLounge, MacNN, MacRumors, Macworld, TUAW and over a dozen more.

The other new site is from Salvador Gonzalez whose SitiosWAP, is one of the most popular Spanish language mobile web portals. Salvador has just released an English language edition of SitiosWA.

The focus of SitiosWAP is to provide a mobile directory aimed primarily at the Hispanic audience, with sites selected on the basis of the quality of their information and services. There are extensive listings of mobile properties from and about each of the Latin American countries and Spain as well as links to Spanish editions of major US and International mobile news, sports, travel and information sites

The new site, english.sitioswap.com has an English user interface and lists and links to sites in both English and Spanish. It seems like a good destination for someone who is bilingual but whose Spanish is not quite as strong as their English and for anyone learning Spanish.

I’ve added these sites to the WapReview Directory in the followwing categories:

Mobility Beat – Technology/Mobile/News – Reviews
Tech News Tube – Technology/Tech News
Mac Hash –Technology/Apple
SitiosWAP – Portals

If you have discovered or created a mobile site I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a comment on this post or use the Contact Form and provide the following information;

Site name as you would like it to appear in the directory.
Mobile Site URL.
A brief description of the site. In particular I want to know what makes this site different from and superior to other similar mobile web sites.

Please note that Wap Review is focused on free and ad-supported, off-deck mobile browsing and does not cover the following types of sites and services.

Sites that are on-deck only.
Pay or subscription sites or sites sites selling downloadable content such as ringtones or games.
Gambling, dating or adult sites.
Non-mobile sites.
Installable mobile applications except web browsers.
Sites that are not in English.

I receive many more submissions than I can possibly cover. I’m much more likely to write about your site if it’s free from validation errors, scores a four or better on the Ready.mobi Test and provides iunique information or services that will be useful to Wap Review readers.