Found on the Mobile Web

A weekly posting of sites recently discovered on the mobile web. These sites have been added to the YesWAP.com Mobile Portal and to Wap Review‘s directory of mobile sites.

This week’s Found on the Mobile Web sites listed by their WapReview/YesWAP category (in bold):

News/US Local by State/

The Cape Cod Times, is a daily from Massachusetts’ well know summer resort area. The PDA style mobile edition (www.capecodonline.com/avantgo/) features about 40 articles from the paper in text-only handheld form. All stories in all sections are linked off the home page which is about 35 KB – a little too large for many phone’s built-in browsers.

San Jose Mercury News unifiedmobility.net/mercurynews/ Silicon Valley’s hometown paper – full article content in a lightweight text-only format.

Portals

Alltel: I like mobile carriers who host their portals on public urls. While carrier portals all tend to link to the same boring mainstream sites, sometimes you find something unique and interesting. With Alltel the surprise was their JumpTap search (review). Alltel is the US’ 5th largest carrier and covers mainly rural areas with a well regarded CDMA/EV-DO network. wap.alltel.motricity.com/portal/home

Shopping

Shop Bazzar (www.harpersbazaar.com/avantgo/) is a directory of fashion boutiques in New York, London, Paris, Milan and Hong Kong. Although published by Harper’s Bazzar, which is noted for it’s fashion photography, the site is text only.

Sports/Motorsports

Crash.Net www.crash.net/avantgo/ is a very extensive motorsports site with a sick name covering everything from NASCAR to Rally to F1 and MotoGP. It’s an old-school text-only PDA site but features lots of in-depth, well written stories.

Technology/Mobile/Mobile Social/

Facebook Mobile m.facebook.com: The popular social networking site Facebook has opened their, formerly exclusive to Cingular, mobile edition to users on any network. If you are not a Facebook user you will have to register on the Facebook web site first.

Technology/Mobile/Forums/

MotorolaFans.com mobile.motorolafans.com: is a forum for users of Motorola phones with the emphasis on Linux models like the A1200 Ming. It’s a great resource for owners, prospective owners and anyone interested in these phones. The mobile version of MotorolaFans gives read-only access to all the forums and topics.

Technology/Mobile/MobileTech/

Paxmodept: mobile.paxmodept.com/ : Paxmodept is a mobile Web and Java development shop. They host a small mobile portal that includes a set of tools for the mobile web developer. Curious about what types of types of audio and video content your phone can handle? Use Paxmodept’s Multi Media File Tester. There are also tests for Javascript and markup capabilities as well as for support of special uri’s like wtai:// tel:// and sms:// and a copy of Luca Passani’s GAP templates.

HTML Dog, a site featuring HTML and CSS tutorials, hosts a page at htmldog.com/test/handheld.html that tests mobile browser support for the CSS “handheld” media type. “One web” development will be easier when most mobiles recognize the “handheld” type – does your’s? Test it here.

Markup Test Pages Web design authority Cameron Moll hosts this series of pages (cameronmoll.com/articles/mobile/mkp/ ) to test a mobile browser’s support for a various html elements like font sizing, tables, access keys, images and for javascript.

Travel-Transit/Air/Airlines AOL City Guide

Qantas – the Australian airline has two mobile sites with no duplication in functions. The wml site at www.qantas.com.au/wap/dyn/Main provides real-time arrival and departure times, while the PDA site at qantas.com.au/pda/ is a complete, but static, international time table. The PDA site requires a QVGA or better display – the table based layout barely works on a 240px wide screen, anything less yields an illegible mess.

Travel-Transit/City Guides

AOL City Guides at wap.aol.com/cityguide/ seems to be AOL’s replacement for Digital City Mobile mobile.digitalcity.com/ (wml) which used to be my favorite city guide but has developed a bunch of broken links lately. Everything works in City Guides but compared to Digital City there are far fewer listings and superficial descriptions instead of real reviews.