Here and Now, Nokia’s New Mobile Portal

Nokia launched a new mobile site yesterday called “Here and Now“. It’s a mobile portal emphasizing music news and movie reviews from Rolling Stone and also featuring news from Reuters, gossip from US Weekly, game and application downloads, videos and a small directory of 3rd party mobile websites. Nokia claims Here and Now is targeted at 18 to 35 year olds. That’s OK by me if it keeps the marketing pros at Nokia employed but I really don’t see how interest in music, news, sports, celebrities and games is unique to any one age group.

I’m definitely not in the target demographic but I did find “Here and Now” a nice little portal. The easiest way to get to it is to start at nokia.mobi and click the big Here and Now banner. The direct url is nokia.mobi/hereandnow which redirects to nokia.12dld.mobi/zone/index.do. The 12dld.mobi domain belongs to Germany’s 12snap who apparently created Here and Now for Nokia and are hosting it as well.

Here and Now looks great in WebKit on my N95 (1st image). In other browsers, including Opera Mini, it degrades to a rather bland wml version (2nd image), Nokia or rather 12snap, even tries to send wml to Skyfire which doesn’t support it and prompts you to download index.do! You would think that 12snap would check Accept headers before blindly sending wml to unrecognized devices. I guess someone decided that Here and Now really only needed to support the default Nokia browsers. “Not Invented Here” syndrome lives.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Portals

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