Found on the Mobile Web is an occasional WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the yeswap.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 956 mobile sites.

Entertainment/Movies

Netflix Mobile (netflix.com/mobile) is the mobile version of the hugely popular subscription service that lends movie DVDs by mail and also has a limited on-demand streaming service. The mobile site (Netflix member ID required) lets you view your Netflix queue. You can also search for movies by title and view the cast list, poster art and a plot synopsis of each movie. From the search results you can add a movie to your queue but you can’t do any other sort of queue management like removing titles or reordering items.

MovieTickets.com (mobile.movietickets.com/) Fandango Mobile (review) now has some competition from this updated mobile site from MovieTickets.com. Both MovieTickets.com and Fandango are very similar in concept, you first set up an account and give the service your credit card information (Fandango lets you do this right on the mobile site but MovieTickets makes you go to their website to register). When you want to buy a movie ticket using your phone it only takes a few clicks because your credit card is on file. Like Fandango, Movie Tickets lets you search for movies showing nearby, lists show times and has mini reviews. Both services add a service charge to the price of the ticket, Fandango’s is $1.25, MovieTickets’s service charge is a dollar for web purchases, I suspect it’s the same for mobile ones but there doesn’t seem to be any way to verify that without purchasing a ticket.

Portals

Comcast (m.comcast.net), the largest US cable television provider and a major fixed line broadband provider now has a mobile site. Main features of Comcast Mobile are access to Comcast Web Mail for subscribers and a fairly extensive News Portal with Sports, Finance, Technology, Entertainment, Television and Politics sections.

Entertainment/Mobile Video

ChannelChooser (channelchooser.com/mobile.php) This seems to be the ultimate streaming video site for Windows Mobile users with over 300 channels to choose from, everything from news to sports to music, all neatly categorized. Too bad all content is in Windows Media format rather than 3gpp or mpg4 which would work on a much wider range of mobile devices.

Technology/Tech News

PC Magazine Mobile (mobile.pcmag.com) News, reviews and columns from PC Magazine’s website. Full text of articles but no images. Produced by mdog.

Technology/Mobile/MobileTech

Mobile Acid Test (jwtmp.com/a/) Mobile version of the browser Acid Test which checks a browser’s compliance with CSS and xhtml standards.

Search/Local/City Guides

Hong Kong Wireless Map (ypmap.com/wince) Slick interactive map of Hong Kong. Search by address or building name or browse for public facilities like schools, libraries and government offices. The maps are very high quality, scrollable and with four levels of zoom. You can toggle the display of icons showing the location nearby ATMs, Banks, stores and karaokes! on the maps. Clicking an icon gives details about businesses. The site is designed for Pocket PC’s but is usable with Opera Mini except that clicking the icons , which relies on an image map, doesn’t work.

Travel-Transit/Transit

Metro.net Mobile (metro.net/mobile) Interactive transit trip planner from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Enter your starting and ending points, time and the day of the week. (all fields default to current date and time – nice) and get a recommended routing on public transit. Locations can be entered as address, cross streets or landmarks like “LAX” or “city hall”. The planner seems to work well and be easy to use. The LAMTA recommends using Opera Mini to view the site and even provides a download link!

Mail-IM-Talk-PIM
Google Docs (docsgoogle.com/m) Google’s online office is now available in a limited fashion on the mobile web. The mobile site officially only supports Blackberries and the iPhone. but Google dooesn’t block you from trying with any phone. I found the Opera Mini 4.0 beta worked fine for viewing word processing documents but I got a JavaScript error when I tried to edit. The presentation of spreadsheets left much to be desired as only a single column of the sheet was displayed. Going to the next column requires reloading the page. It’s really hard to keep track of where you are in a spreadsheet when you can only see one column at a time. Opera Mini’s desktop view and horizontal scrolling would really be useful for viewing spreadsheets if Google would send the whole page and let Opera do its thing instead of restricting the page to a single column. I’d love to see Google optimize Docs for Opera Mini, the combination would be quite powerful. iPhone users presumably can see the whole sheet at once and can also view presentations.

I couldn’t log into Google Docs at all using my Motorola i850’s built in browser. I get a “Bad Request Error 400”. That’s the same error that’s been bedeviling Nextel users for over a year when trying to login to the mobile web version of gMail or Google Reader. See this thread in the Google Mobile Help Group. Will Google ever fix this bug!