Found on the Mobile Web #32

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 1026 mobile sites.

Search/Directions

Ask Voice Enabled Driving DirectionsAsk – Directions (m.ask.com/ddhome.jsp?form=dd) Ask.com’s mobile driving directions site now features a clever voice recognition system that works with any web enabled phone. To use it you start at Ask’s mobile search page, m.ask.com and instead of typing your origin and end addresses you can click on the Directions (NEW! Voice Entry!) link which places a phone call to dialdirections.com‘s voice recognition system where you say your starting and ending addresses. The service sends you a text message with a link to a mobile web page containing the directions. It’s kind of low tech but very effective From: jkOntheRun

Search

T-Mobile USA Locator (locator.t-mobile.com) If you have a T-Mobile phone or a WiFi hotspot account this mobile search form might be useful. You can search for hotspots, T-Mobile branded stores, bill payment locations and independent retailers selling T-Mobile phones (with a separate search for for stores selling Pay As You Go starter kits).

News

WordTube (m.wordtube.com ) This site aggregates news headlines from a number of sources including Reuters, The New York Times, Google News, Yahoo News and OMG. WordTube editors pick the best stories for inclusion on the WordTube Top News page. There are additional separate WordTube pages for top stories in Sport, Business, Opinion, Culture and Regional News.

Travel – Transit/Hotels

Omni Hotels Omni Hotels (mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.omnihotels.com) Finding and booking hotels at the last minute is something every traveler has to do occasionally. The mobile web should be an ideal way to do this yet mobile hotel sites all seem to be pretty bad. Omni’s is better than most but lacks an easy way to call a hotel. The site promises to help you find a hotel, make and view reservations, do online check in and view your rewards program details for the luxury Omni Hotels chain in the US, Canada and Mexico. I tried using it to check availability at the San Francisco Omni. Checking availability and rates was OK but actually booking a room was a bit of a hassle because the site required my full credit card information; name billing address, card number and expiration date plus a phone number and email address. No problem, the hotel’s phone number is on the mobile page I’ll just call the hotel and book – except that the number is not click to call! How dumb is that? You can at least avoid having to enter your CC details by registering in advance on Omni’s web site.

Entertainment

Mindzai (mindzai.mobi) Mobile edition of Mindzai.tv, an arts and design blog covering fashion, photography andvideo. Lots of nice photos on this site although they aren’t resized for mobile making some of the pages too big (as much as 150KB) to load on many phones.

TapaTap (m.tapatap.com) Here’s something new. TapaTap is a mobile contest community. You can create a contest to find the “Best NBA Dunks” or “Cutest Puppy” and upload one or more photos that you hope are winners. Other members can submit their own photos and can vote for the best entries. Most contests are just for fun but some carry prizes ranging from $100 to a $1485 valued “Model Search America-Next National Showcase Package in the “Searching for America’s Models- MALE” contest. The site is actually a lot of fun and seems popular with some contests having received over 100,000 votes.

Entertainment/Photo Sharing

SnapMyLife (snapmylife.com) A mobile photo sharing site. It’s an open network like Flickr meaning anyone, even non-members, can view your photos unless you mark them as private. You upload your photos by email or MMS and create a network of friends. Photos marked as private are visible only to your network. All photos are resized to 240px wide when displayed on the site. A potential problem is the size of the site’s photo index pages which each contain ten 70X100 thumbnails for a total page weight over 100 KB. The built in browsers of many phones can only handle 20 KB.

Reference

USA.gov (mobile.usa.gov) The US government now has an official mobile site. It’s configured as a search engine with a search box at the top and a choice of several search categories below. You can do a global search of all government agencies and services or pick a category to do a specialized search for a weather forecast, images, members of congress or toll free numbers of agencies which are listed as click to call links. There is also a directory of federal and state government agencies. Search and directory results pointing to full-web content are converted to mobile format by a white label transcoder.

Technology/Mobile/MobileTech

RDR.cc RDR.cc (rdr.cc) A redirection service for mobile sites. This is aimed at users of the free mobile hosting provided by mobile social sites like TagTag, Peperonity, Treemo, Mob5 or Buzzed. With these services your free site usually ends up with a long hard to type url like peperonity.com/go/sites/mview/n95. Those slashes are a PITA to type on most phones. RDR solves this problem by letting you choose a short, much easier to type url like n95.rdr.cc. When visitors go to the RDR address they are redirected to your social networking site. This could also come in handy if you later decide to switch from one social network to another. RDR can even redirect visitors to different sites based on the visitor’s country as determined by their IP address.

Mail-IM-Talk-PIM

GrandCentral (grandcentral.com/mobile) Google owned free call forwarding and voicemail service. I’m not going to describe the GrandCentral service in detail as it’s been covered by thousands of articles and posts. Essentially it gives you a new phone number which you can set to ring any or all of up to 6 mobile, landline or Gizmo Project SIP numbers. There are loads of other features like call blocking and screening, custom voicemail greetings and temporary call diversion. GrandCentral’s mobile web site gives you complete control over your GrandCentral number; you can change which phones ring, temporarily block calls or divert them to a new number, view call records, listen to voice mails by downloading them as mp3’s and manage and place calls from your GrandCentral phone book. The service has been in closed beta for what seems like forever but invites are pretty easy to get. In fact, I have 10 invites to give out. If you would like one just leave a comment.

4 thoughts on “Found on the Mobile Web #32

  1. helloct,

    The mobile version of this site is wapreview.mobi. There has never been a “mobi.wapreview.com” and I haven’t switched to MoFuse.

    Regarding MoFuse, I set up the mofuse site (wapreview.mofuse.mobi) to test mofuse when I was reviewing it. I left it up so I could have a permanent link to a sample MoFuse blog in the article, you are free to use it if you want but I think wapreview.mobi is better.

    Sorry you don’t like the write background. I think it’s MUCH more readable than a dark background and have no plans to change it. If it hurts your eyes maybe you can adjust your phone’s contrast or brightness.

    Sorry that Opera Mini stopped working for you, it’s probably a settings issue, see Solving Opera Mini Connection Issues or The Opera Mini Forum for some help.

    Are you saying that wapreview.mobi doesn’t work in your phone’s native browser? What phone is it and what error do you get. My goal is for it to work on all phones.

  2. Hello, i’m a fan of this but It’s the first time i post a comment. 1: I’d like to know why You’ve change your site from mobi.wapreview.com to i mofuse.wapreview.com ? 2: as you like the comfort of using mobile internet for those who can’t use opera mini, i’d like you change You’re white background to a blak one like in peperonity or darker cause when i read a long text, like “found on the web” , i can’t finish it do to the high brightness of my screan. And 3: I used opera mini two months ago but now it can’t connect, only the native browser work and lot of site are bloked like wapos.ws and this one, unless i use mowser or phonifier . All my setting are normal and i’ve help lot of people in the opera mini forum when they have the similar problem, but i can’t do nothing for myself. Good thank, my mobile internet connection is free.

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