Daily Gadget a popular blog and forum covering geek toys – including phones, pda’s and the latest PC and mac hardware and software – now has a mobile site.
The mobile site appears to have built using phpBB, the popular Open Source forum software with the phbBBlite template. The lite template wasn’t really designed for mobile sites but rather for building low bandwidth web sites. Nonetheless, it works fairly well as a WAP2 site. The main page is 19 KB which is a little large for some phones – if you run into that problem, just run it through the AOL or Google proxies.

The main page consists of the latest blog items as a single scrolling page. This works fairly well on a PDA where the screen is relatively large and there is usually a way to quickly scroll a page at a time. On a phone, it’s really only practical to read the articles sequentially – there is no way to jump from one article to the next.

It’s too bad Daily Gadget didn’t choose to use WiForums, a nice add-on for phpBB and several other PHP-based forum platforms. WiForums is used by Howard Forums, Wireless Advisor and a number of other forum sites to provide a true mobile site supporting both WAP1 and WAP2 with very good usability.

If you are a Daily Gadget regular, you will probably find the mobile version of the site worth visiting, if a little frustrating unless you are using a PDA phone like the Treo or the Sony Ericsson P910. On the other hand, if you are just looking for a a mobile site covering the latest tech gadgets you will probably be happier with one of the higher rated sites in Wap Review’s Tech News section.

Content: Usability: html