The Beijing Olympics are now underway, the opening ceremonies have already happened although we won’t see them on TV in the US until “Prime Time” this evening. I featured 12 Olympic mobile sites last month in Get Ready for the Olympics on Your Phone, since then four more mobile sites have created dedicated Olympics pages so here’s a quick look at the new entrants.

In the original article I mentioned the mobile version of Google News as a good way to check for Olympic results and scores, particularly for specific sports.  Google has made the process even easier with an official Google Mobile Olympics site (google.com/m/summergames). The front page presents a list of sports, clicking a link takes you to a schedule of upcoming events and links to news items on the sport from around the web. According to the Google Mobile Blog, results and medal counts will appear as soon as there is something to report. Also from Google, check out the Google logo celebrating the Olympics on the G’s mobile search page. Google says this is the first time mobile search has featured a custom logo.

Reuters UK has an Olympics page with results and stories from the games at uk.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/Category/eUK/COLYU. BTW, there ought to be a law against such long URLs on mobile sites, some people actually type these things in on the keypad! The site features lots of images, 40 of the opening ceremonies alone. The images are re-sized to fit the screens of different phone models and are shown one per page for fast loading even on slow connections.

USA Water Polo has a slick profession ally designed site (usawaterpolo.mobi) with schedules, scores, photos and bios of each member of the men’s and women’s team and free wallpapers to download.

My favorite general mobile sports site, ESPN, has Olympics coverage at m.espn.go.com/extra/olympics/hotcorner?id=3483993. Another ugly URL, no one is going to type that in on a phone. It’s a lot easier to go to the main ESPN mobile page at espn.mobi and then scroll down a couple screenfuls to the “Special Coverage” section where there’s a link to “2008 Summer Olympics”. Once you get to the ESPN Olympics page there’s a ton of coverage; news, schedules, results, a medal tracker, Olympic trivia, a history of the Olympics and dedicated pages for the major sports. Strangely, there are almost photos on ESPN’s mobile Olympics pages. I can see limiting images for legacy phones and slow connections but even with the N95 and iPhone, I see no images other than ads and logos!

I put links to all 16 mobile Olympics site on a special page on the YesWap portal, browse to Sports/Beijing Olympics from the yeswap.com homepage or type in yeswap.com/?id=1470 to go straight to the Olympics homepage.  Sorry about that URL with those special characters.  I need practice what I preach and map the YesWap pages to easy to type sub-domains.

Related: Mobile Site Directory – Sports/Beijing Olympics