U.S. discount stock broker Scottrade has a new mobile site with a rich feature set. Public features, available without login, include market research and news (markets overview, statistics, news & commentary, analyst views and a brief market calendar), stock quotes and research (news & commentary, charts, options, fundamentals, insider transactions, earnings, financials and a stock screener), ETF quotes and research (news & commentary, charts, options, performance, portfolio, expenses, Lipper rankings and ETF screener).

Scottrade customers can log in to make trades and view detailed balances, positions and order status.

The site is clearly designed for (and looks best on) advanced handsets with good CSS support like the iPhone. It also works perfectly in Opera Mini, the Symbian Webkit browser, BlackBerry and Android devices although the rounded corner buttons have an jagged appearance in these browsers.

I’m a firm believer in mobile sites supporting as many devices as possible. The Scottrade site doesn’t do too well on non-smartphones. It has fairly modest page sizes of under 30 KB and the public features of the site are at least functional on the Openwave browsers found on many feature phones. Appearance and usabilitry with the Openwave browsers is marred by big banners demanding that JavaScript be turned on, which is impossible as these browsers have no Javascript support. As the site seems to work on browsers without JavaScript the warning seems unnecessary especially as it appears on every page. Nokia S40 phones with the legacy “Services” browser are able to load Scottrade Mobile, but the site is almost unusable on these phones because of a variety of problems including unreadable background/foreground color combinations and text columns only a couple of characters wide.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Business/Quotes & Trading

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 3 “Fair”

Mobile Link: m.scottrade.com