Wap Review

Google's personal homepage/portal comes in two flavors; a basic WAP page for legacy browsers (bottom image)  and a much richer version that's served to iPhones and Android devices (top image). The rich version consists of mobile formatted versions of all your desktop iGoogle widgets except those that are Flash based. Each widget appears as a large button initially, which when tapped expands to reveal its content.

On my Android phone, iGoogle works great, it displays all the tabs and compatible widgets that I’ve defined in the desktop version. It doesn’t seem to possible to specify that specific widgets appear only in the mobile or only in the desktop version. All the widgets I tried; Twitter Gadget, Google News, Mail and Calendar and Ping.fm worked well.

The basic version of iGoogle that's served by defaullt to all devices except iPhones and Android devices doesn't use content from your desktop iGoogle widgets. Instead it lets you add add and arange content from a predefined list of widgets including, Gmail, Google Calendar, News, Bookmarks, Stocks, Movies and Top Search Trends plus news feeds from about 50 non-Google sources including the Onion, Economist, NPR, PC Magazine and E! Online.

You can force the iPhone/Android version to display in any browser by using the URL google.com/m/ig?uipref=6 In most cases won't look or work well with unsupported browsers.

The latest version of Yahoo Mobile is a very flexible and open web portal which allows you to add virtually any sort of content, including third party content like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, YouTube, Bebo, any RSS feed and just about every Yahoo service that exists including weather, over a dozen different Yahoo News categories, stock quotes and movie showtimes.

The Twitter integration is great, definitely the prettiest mobile web interface to Twitter yet. It's a little disconcerting though that links in tweets are plain text. However, if you click a tweet it opens up the author's timeline in Twitter Mobile where you can follow the link. The extra click doesn't add any value, why not just let me follow the link in the first place?

The Gmail interface works kind of the same way. The Yahoo Mobile homepage shows you how many unread emails you have and when you click on the status it opens Gmail's own mobile web interface.

Yahoo is limits access to the new portal browsers that are able to display it well.That includes the iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 9.5 and Samsung Instinctl, older devices get the legacy version (bottom inmage). It includes Yahoo's great news and sports coverage, the web, mobile web and image search components of oneSearch, driving directions and  access to your Flickr photos, Yahoo email, address book and calendar and IM.

Yahoo has had a mobile presence since 1999. At first the service was aimed at PDA's. But by early 2000 Yahoo had a WAP site which not only had news, sports, finance sections, weather, White and Yellow Pages search and driving directions, but also allowed users access to their mail accounts, calendar, address book, Yahoo messenger and Yahoo auctions.

Early on, Yahoo had the ability to sync your Yahoo calendar and address book with Outlook, Notes, ACT or Palm Desktop. This meant that with WAP your phone could give you access to your business appointments and contacts. Simultaneously with the WAP portal launch, Yahoo released Mobile Alerts, a rules based engine that would send a text message to your phone when an email arrived, a meeting was starting soon or a stock price passed a trigger amount. This combination of integrated was very advanced stuff for it's time. 1999 and 2000 were the heady days of early WAP enthusiasm. However, user acceptance of WAP failed to meet expectations as the high data costs, slow response and limited content of early WAP did not live up to the initial hype. Nonetheless, Yahoo continued to maintain and support their WAP services but did not make any major enhancements for four years.

Late in 2004, Yahoo released a completely redesigned mobile portal. The new site was WAP2, although the original WAP1 version is still available and works as well as ever. The new portal features all the content of the WAP1 version enhanced with small photos accompanying some of the news stories plus two new features Yahoo Mobile Search and a RSS reader.

In July, 2005 Yahoo launched SMS search. You text it a search string and it sends back the results in another SMS. On the mobile web side Yahoo added Local and Shopping (review) searches in 2005.

Yahoo redesigned their mobile home page again in August 2006. The new design was more attractive but no longer had accesskeys, reducing usability.  Read more about that Yahoo redesign on my blog.

Yahoo's oneSearch for mobile came out in 2007.  It combines results from Yahoo's Web, Mobile Web, Shopping Local, News and image searches on a single page . You can also set filters to return only one type of results, like shopping or images.

Microsoft has rolled out another new mobile homepage. The new design makes the search box the first thing you see and puts weather, news, sports and entertainment headlines right on the front page. Compared with the previous version of MSN mobile and evenmobile.live.com homepages, which are just lists of links, the latest beta requires fewer clicks to reach real content. Surprisingly the new page is no larger than the old ones at only 8KB including images.

Microsoft is in the middle of a massive roll-out of a new and revamped Live portal which they have dubbed Windows Live Wave 3.  Wave 3 is all about social networking.  Live users now have a  Profile complete with picture, status-like "personal message" and a "What's new with your network" feed of what your Live friends and contacts are doing.  The existing 30 million user Windows Live Spaces social network, which is especially strong in Asia and on mobile, is still around but it's looking a little neglected with many of it's features duplicated in the new Live portal.

The latest mobile Live has a subset of the features in the full Live Wave 3.  It looks nothing like the simple page of links to other Microsoft mobile web sites that has been at mobile.live.com for the last couple of years. Design wise it's quite simple and elegant with everything new contained in just four pages; Home, People, Photos and Profile.

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America Online's mobile site. AOL seems to making more of it's content available to non-members. Currently, this includes news, weather, sports, business, Yellow and White Pages as well as links to other AOL properties like Mapquest, DigitalCity and MovieFone, The news, sports and business sections are quite good with full length articles. Usability of the WML site is optimized for Openwave browsers and is awkward on others. The xhtml (wap2) site was launched August 2005 is is quite good, and adds search to the available options. AOL searches for full web sites rather than mobile sites and reformats the results to make them usable on WAP 2.0 phones Mobile and Shopping searches are also offered.

The "Web 2.0" Personalized home page site Netvibes, has launched a slick looking mobile edition. Customize you Netvibes mobile page with calendar, weather, notes, email (Y!, gMail, AOL Mail, Hotmail or POP/IMAP) and RSS or Atom feeds. This site is big in the blogosphere, the best links: Unwired View's review, Steve Rubel's cautions on security.

Personal portal site, Netvibes has launched optimized "Touch Web" versions of the site for the iPhone, iPad and Android. Rather than using a single URL and browser detection to optimizing the site to each platform, Netvibes provides separate URLs;
iphone.netvibes.com
ipad.netvibes.com
android.netvibes.com
for each platform. The appearance, UI and content of all three variants appears identical although there are undoubtedly some behind the screen optimizations for each.

According to NetVibes, the sites deliver a seamless experience across desktop and mobile with real time synchronization of read/unread items across platforms
Source: NetVibes Blog

Ovi (http://ovi.nokia.com/) Nokia's soon to be released Ovi "personal dashboard" already has a mobile site. At this point there's not much there but descriptions of the services Ovi will eventually provide; photo and video sharing, music downloads, maps and directions, calendar and contact synchronization and games. The site promises it's all coming soon so "check back regularly..."

Nokia launched a new mobile site yesterday called "Here and Now". It's a mobile portal emphasizing music news and movie reviews from Rolling Stone and also featuring news from Reuters,  gossip from US Weekly, game and  application downloads, videos and a small directory of 3rd party mobile websites.  Nokia claims Here and Now is targeted at 18 t0 35 year olds.  That's OK by me if it keeps the marketing pros at Nokia employed but I really don't see how  interest in music, news, sports, celebrities and games is unique to any one age group.

I'm definitely not in the target demographic  but I did find "Here and Now" a nice little portal. The easiest way to get to it is to start at nokia.mobi and click the big Here and Now banner. The direct url is nokia.mobi/hereandnow which redirects to  nokia.12dld.mobi/zone/index.do.  The 12dld.mobi domain belongs to Germany's 12snap who apparently created Here and Now for Nokia and are hosting it as well.

Here and Now looks great in WebKit on my N95 (1st image).  In other browsers, including Opera Mini, it degrades to a rather bland wml version (2nd image)  Nokia or rather 12snap, even tries to send wml to Skyfire which doesn't support it and prompts you to download index.do!   You would think  that 12snap would check Accept headers before blindly sending wml to unrecognized devices. I guess  someone decided that Here and Now really only needed to support the default Nokia browsers. Not invented here syndrome lives.

Mippin is a mobile portal built from RSS feeds. In itself that's not new, Feed2Mobile. Mowser, FeedM8 and Winksite all offer directories of mobile formated feeds. They all have their own mix of features. Mippin emphasizes ease of use and I think is a good choice for users new to the mobile web.

Mippin's front page lists the top six stories facilitating discovery. Another usability feature is that Mippin stores your browsing history and displays it as MyMippin at the top of the homepage. The MyMippin list persists across sessions and can be edited it to delete unwanted sites. It's just a browser history list but it does serve as an automatic bookmarking feature for users. Fast page loads are an important part of usability and Mippin loads quickly even on low end phones because page and image sizes are varied to suit the handset.

The primary way to navigate Mippin is a categorized directory of sites . There's also search box that doubles as a URL entry form. You can enter a familiar web URL like Engadget.com rather than having to key the full feed URL such as engadget.com/rss.xml. Keying a URL lets you add sites that aren't in Mippin's directory to your MyMippin but doesn't seem to add them to the directory.

Mippin also has some mobile social elements. You can send a story to a friend by email or Twitter. There's a voting feature, thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on each feed's index page let you cast your vote with the running total displayed. Mippin's users seem to be hard to please with most sites hovering around a 50% approval rate.

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An impressive mobile portal from South Africa built largely on mashups with mainstream and white label services.

It includes; mobile specific web search with news and real time results, trending topics and item sharing,  canned SMS messages, news, sports and weather feeds, GetJar downloads, Wikipedia search, a WapMasters section, Yahoo map search, chat rooms and mobile web directory.

InSyt has its own social network called "My Insyt" with profiles, status updates, blogs, inbox, comments, friends and followers.

Search results, etc. can be shared on Twitter, or Facebook using Delivr, email or SMS. Detects touch devices an delivers a touch optimized version to them.

An ambitious new portal, dir.mobi features three types of content. At the top of the page are links to more than 340 mobile sites. Below that are mobile front ends to several internet directories that are part of the Open Directory Project, like the ChefMoz restaurant review directory and a large song lyric database. There's a tremendous amount of content here although response can be very slow and some links lead to non-mobile sites. Finally there a section of news, weather, stocks and directions, etc. which links to major sites like USA Today, Yahoo and Mapquest.

KeyToss describes itself as a "Powerful, personalizable portal for smartphones". I think that's a pretty good description. The default KeyToss home page shows has a search box offering a choice of search engines, current weather forecast, recent sports scores, stock quotes, a section of news headlines and about 20 well chosen links to frequently used information like movie show times and flight status.

KeyToss is highly customizable. without even registering, users can change their location and favorite teams, choose which mobile links and search engines are displayed and add content from a list of 40 preselected RSS feeds. These changes are saved with a cookie. Registered users can make further customizations like adding pages and choosing from over 600 feeds on KeyToss' full web site. You can customize how each feed is displayed including whether to display summaries or just headlines, the number of items to show and whether external content should be transcoded. The choice of feeds does seems to be limited to the 600 preselected ones. Although KeyToss says "Is there a website or blog that you'd like to see? If it has an RSS or Atom news feed, you can add it yourself", I could not find any way to add arbitrary feeds.

Something that makes KeyToss unique among mobile portals is that it acts as a location broker. When you access some sites through the KeyToss portal, your current location is passed to the site. It's not GPS, you do have to set your location manually in KeyToss, and it's only grandular down to the city name for international locations or zip code for US ones, but is a real timesaver to not have to enter your location on Google Local, Yelp or jWire's WiFi finder. I'd like to see KeyToss integrate this functionality with Yahoo's FireEagle, which when combined with Navizon, can pass GPS or cell tower location through an API. More...

Oh! Mobile is a fast growing mobile portal with over 1000 hand picked links for quality (does not accept adult or gaming sites) mobile web sites. Listings are organized into hierarchical categories and each includes a brief description of the site . Oh! Mobile is quite similar in size and purpose to WapReview/YesWap but with a different mix of sites.

Rediff is the most popular Indian based web portal with around five million monthly pageviews and 65 million users of it's free web based email service, Rediffmail. It's a comprehensive portal rivaling Yahoo and MSN in scope and features.

Rediff's mobile version at mobile.rediff.com offers Indian and world news, business, sports and movie news, detailed stock quotes, horoscopes, a "Get Ahead" section featuring personal improvement articles, job search, lowest airfare search and direct links to the mobile versions of Rediffmail and Rediff's BOL IM service.

There is also a Rediff branded search engine which unfortunately seems to return exclusively transcoded desktop content. This happens even with sites like YouTube and Wap Review which normally use browser detection to deliver their own mobile formatted content. The videos are broken on the transcoded YouTube pages too.

Rediff mobile is a good general news and information site that should be popular with Rediff portal, Rediffmail and BOL users. There are better choices for mobile search, however.

Off-deck mobile web portal from Motricity,a big provider of white-label mobile portals and ring tone, game, application downloads to mobile network operators including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-mobile, Bell Mobility, Tracfone, Virgin U.K., KPN, and Vodafone.

The Motricity portal has news, sports, weather, business, movie reviews, movie show times, a theater locator and horoscopes. There's a somewhat misleading download page that lists individual paid downloads, but the "Buy Now" button redirects to Thumbplay, where the only option is a $9.95/month subscription service.

Mowser.com is Russell Beattie's latest mobile site. It combines search, a transcoder and a mobile site directory with over 500 links, a directory of over 2000 feeds, chat room, forum and Russ' new blog.

It's an impressive mobile portal. In brief testing the transcoder  worked well. The search results are high quality, I tried to figure out which major search engine Mowser is using by trying the same queries in Mowser, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. It looks like it's Live. A neat touch is that the results include small 150 px wide images (from Snap.com) of each search hit. The mobile directory is very complete and is supplemented by the huge categorized feed directory which essentially creates another 2000 mobile sites web sites.

Mobile transcoders have not been too popular with webmasters and content providers but Mowser is attempting to change that by giving site owners unprecedented control over how their transcoded site looks in Mouser. By adding a few meta tags (see the Mowser blog for details) to your site you can:

• Have Mowser insert YOUR AdMob mobile ads (with your AdMob site ID) into transcoded sites so you can get some revenue from the transcoded pages.

• Control page appearance by adding a media="handheld" stylesheet which Mowser will use when transcoding your site.

• Have Google and possibly other search engines direct mobile users to the Mowser transcooded version of your site.

Another nice touch is that if Mowser detects a true mobile site it shows it unaltered - something I wish Google and Skweezer's transcoders did.

All in all I'm very impressed with Mowser. It's a brand new site and while it has a few issues with encoding special characters and page size, I think it's already an ideal place to call your mobile home. Give it a try and be sure and let Russ know what is and isn't working for you.

Disclaimer - this is not a review. YesWap.com is a mobile site I created to showcase what I consider to be the best of the mobile web. It wouldn't be honest to review my own site but I really want to tell you about it.

YesWap appears to be a simple wap portal, nothing but links in a hierarchical menu. The menu structure is exactly the same as that of WapReview.com. So if your browsing WapReview reading the reviews, and you see a site you'd like to view on your phone it should be easy to find on YesWap.com. If it's under Technology | Mobile Phones in the Review it will be under Technology | Mobile Phones on YesWap.

YesWap supports both older WAP1 wml phones and the newer WAP2 xhtml basic and xhtml-mp devices. The WAP2 version of the site (first image) is spruced up with a little color but otherwise looks and works like the WAP1 site (second image). You should automatically get the right version for your device when you connect to http://yeswap.com. The links to mobile sites you see in the YesWap menu are filtered based on the capabilities of your phone. If a site in the directory has both a WAP1 and a WAP2 version you should get a link to the version your phone can handle. Obviously this is done using browser detection. As I've said before, no browser detection is perfect so I've provided a couple of urls that let you override the browser detection if your device is not being served optimal markup using the main yeswap.com site.

If you go to wml.yeswap.com/, You will always see the WAP1 version of yeswap. You'll get links to sites that support WAP1. Some of these sites themselves use browser detection to serve wml or xhtml. I don't have any control over these linked sites but 95% of the time they do the right thing and send you wml. Another feature of the WAP1 version of Yeswap is that it has a built in (x)html to wml transcoder. If you navigate to a WAP2 only site like the International Herald Tribune, Variety or Slashdot, it will automatically be converted to wml. The transcoder also kicks in if you are on the main yeswap.com site and you phone is detected as being wml only. You will lose images and colored text and backgrounds with the transcoder but web forms and cookies are supported.

If you don't ever want to see WAP1 content, use htm.yeswap.com. The site itself will be rendered in handheld-friendly html which is perfect for PDA's and Sidekicks and also works on virtually all WAP2 devices (second image). In this mode all wml-only sites will be filtered out of the menus. I haven't gotten around to writing a wml to html transcoder and as wml-only sites are getting less and less common I probably never will.

I hope you enjoy Yeswap.com. If it doesn't work for you send me a comment and I'll try to fix it. I probably won't be able to help you if one of the linked sites won't load on your phone. Some sites aren't 100% standards compliant and certain phones are very picky or even outright buggy.

Mobile web portal with local weather, new search, stock quotes, horoscopes and a categorized directory of several thousand mobile sites. Source: Mobility.mobi

Mobile portal and social network Fonet now features Google Buzz integration. Fonet users can view their Buzz timeline and post Buzzes without leaving Fonet.This is the first third party mobile web based Buzz client I've seen.

Buzz is just the latest in a long list of online services and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, Google Calendar and Docs, Delicious.com and Tripit that Fonet integrates with.

Fonet also includes:

A customizable mobile portal with mobile web directory and the ability to add your own links and RSS feeds.

The Fonet social network with profile pages, friends list, messaging, groups and blogs

A personal information manager (PIM) with online phonebook, to do list, contact manager and cloud storage.

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An eclectic mobile portal offering Bollywood news and reviews, cricket scores and news, free ringtone, wallpaper and game downloads along with a page of mobile handset tips and tricks.

An easy to use categorized directory of mobile friendly websites. Most links work with all phones.  Special sections for iPhone webapps and Blackberry and Palm/PDA specific sites.

Links to thousands of audio and video streams are the main attraction at this portal which also includes news and sports headlines, live stocks, chatbox, weather and front ends to multiple mobile search engines, Google translate and other services.

Good link directory with an emphasis on business and travel sites.

Mobile web portal with news and sports headlines from Indiatimes and live scores from cricinfo. You can link Cellz with your Facebook and Google accounts to display your Google Calendar, Gmail Inbox and Facebook status updates

A very comprensive directory of quality PDA sites which is usable on the smallest of screens although most of the links lead to pages which are not obtimized for the smaller phone displays. Particularly stong for news sites.

New mobile link directory and portal with a large catalog of quality sites including a number that I were new to me.

Quick.as is a new web and mobile portal or start page.  It offers a single search box that lets you search with a dozen different search engines on basic phones and over a hundred  different search engines ranging form Google and Yahoo to the Shenzen Stock Exchange and The Pirate Bay on the desktop and phones that support JavaScript  Quick.as is not a meta-search engine, you have to choose a single search engine for each query,

Quick.as claims to detect your phone type and location and deliver appropriately formatted pages and locally relevant results. I found that both features generally worked as advertisted. On an N95 and an Android phone I got Google's mobile web search and Yelp searches defaulted to San Francisco.  However a Yellow Pages search for "sushi" dumped me on the Yellow Pages mobile homepage where I was prompted for both "Search Term" and "City/State or ZIP"!

Quick.as has a small link directory of popular news, sports, social network, email and online banking sites. These links point at non-mobile sites even on the mobile edition of Quick.as. If you set up an account on the Quick.as desktop site you can delete and edit the quick links and add your own.

I think that the concept of Quick.as is good but I'm a little disappointed in the mobile integration.  Login is by email address and a 7 character password.  Login is persistent for only 2 weeks.  Email addresses are a pain to type on mobile because of their length and the "@" sign. The relatively long password and short login retention are both mobile unfriendly and unnecessarily paranoid for a site that stores a simple list of links. Mobile usability woud be improved by allowing users to pick a short ID and password and by persisting logins until explicit logout.

Annother mobile usability issue is that Quick Links are the same across desktop and mobile and require a PC to setup and edit. This excludes the huge and growing number of mobile-only users, especially in the developing world. Also I believe that most users will want a different set of bookmarks on mobile than on the desktop. Either links to mobile vs. desktop versions of sites or to different sites entirely. Thanks to andrewjb44 on Twitter for submitting quick.as for review.

A new mobile web directory. Moblinks has an attractive design and is available in English and French. Listings include description and screenshot and are organized by category and type (classic mobile site or iPhone web app). Mobinks has a full featured search engine and results can be filtered by type.

The other new site is from Salvador Gonzalez' whose SitiosWAP, is one of the most popular Spanish language mobile web portals.  Salvador has launched an English language edition of SitiosWA.

The focus of SitiosWAP is a directory aimed primarily at the Hispanic audience, with mobile sites selected on the basis of the quality of their information and services. There are extensive listings of sites from and about each of the Latin American countries and Spain as well as links to Spanish editons of major US and International mobile news, sports, travel and infromation sites

The new English site has an English user interface and lists and links to sites in both English and Spanish.  It seems like a good destination for someone who is bilingual but whose Spanish is not quite so strong as their English and for anyone  learning Spanish.

Huge (over 800 sites) portal of mobile friendly sites. Browse by categories, and site language. Registered users can add sites and create a personal links page. The site tracks the hits each link gets so you can sort by popularity. The screenshot shows the top 15 English sites by popularity. I was surprised at the popularity of financial sites. MobileTopSoft also has a page of Windows Mobile streaming video sites mostly news and video from around the world.

Free mobile fun stuff including jokes, quizes, tarot card reference, txt talk dictionary, horoscopes, wallpapers, and a small mobile site directory

This new mobile portal covers all the bases: free ringtone downloads, song lyrics, phone reviews, music top 40 and other charts, chat rooms, forums and a news section focusing on entertainment and technology and with a smattering of hard news.

Another large mobile portal. m4u is an extensive list of mobile links grouped in broad categories like "Handy", "Tools" and "Popular". You can also search by name or browse a more specific set of categories (click "Links" to find the category list). The site is available in English and Dutch and carries links in both languages. Changing the interface language doesn't seem to filter the link list to include only sites in the selected language, an advantage only if you are bilingual. The site also has an iPhone version at http://m4u.mobi/iPhone. The iPhone version worked fine in S60WebKit and Opera Mini but other than a larger font it didn't seem to offer any extra features. You are supposed to be able to create your own list of favorite sites but this feature did not seem to work. After selecting "Edit #Favs" an "F" to add the lin to your favorites is supposed to appear next to each listing but I never saw the the "F" link.

Another small directory of PDA friendly links.

A new mobile portal with links to a number of good sites I hadn't seen before. wapSwap also offers free SMS sending (using TeleFlip) and you can create your own personalized My wapSwap homepage.

A mobile directory with over 1600 links, organized by category and searchable.

Only about 15% of US mobile owners actively use the mobile web. The most common reasons given for not using it are that it's too hard to use and that it's hard to find mobile web sites worth visiting.

Startup GetFrog.com, is trying to fix both the usability and discovery issues. Clearly aimed at users who are new to the mobile web, Frog is a personal mobile home page that features extremely simple navigation. The front page, which is practically the only page, is a 3 x 3 icon grid - familiar to mobile users as it's the internal menu layout on most phones. Each icon is a link to a mobile site... (more)

This mobile portal's name combines the words "Quick" and "Mobile" to suggest that it's "blazingly quick". It does seem fast and offers a well rounded selection of 50 News, Sports, Weather, Social Networking sites and Blogs. About half the sites are true mobile sites, the rest are Skweezer transcoded versions of full-web sites.

Here's a neat new site that I found mentioned at MobileRead. It's called news4mobile - which is a sort of misleading name as it's not really a news site. News4mobile is a mobile portal with a social ranking system that makes it sort of a combination of Digg and del.icio.us. Anyone can (after registering) add a link to a mobile site. That's not especially new as there have been lots of sites like that and most of them quickly became a disorderly collection of broken links and links to abandoned TagTag pages that say little more than "This is Bob's mobile site - please leave a comment". But I think the ranking aspect gives news4mobile the potential to become a very big thing. When you add a link you can enter a description and add tags and you get credited as the person who first linked to the site.

The way it works is that news4mobile has a public side and a private side. On the public side news4mobile is a mobile portal or web directory that anyone can use by visiting www.news4mobile.com. The default view lists the top 20 mobile sites in order by how many visits they've received through the news2web portal. You can filter the view to a single category like sports or news, still ranked by popularity within that category. There is also a search function which searches within news4web directory including within descriptions and tags.

If you register you can create a "My news4mobile" which is your private collection of bookmarked links. You can mark each of your links as either public or private. Public links show up in the directory and participate in the ranking process. Private links are visible only to you on your personal page - good if have links to personal notes or projects that can are working on.

On the public side of news2web all users can chose a couple of alternate views of the portal. One is ordered by the number of people who have bookmarked a site and the other puts the most recently added sites first in the list.

The other noteworthy feature is that according to the site's FAQ, "Dead Links will be automatically deactivated if not available and will only be reactivated if they're available again." It seems to be working, so far I haven't found any dead links in news4mobile.

The site is new and there are only about 125 links and probably not many users yet so I don't consider the rankings authoritative. For what it's worth here are the current top 10 mobile sites as ranked by news4mobile.

1 PocketPC Media
2 Pocket Movies
3 eBay
4 Humor on the Internet
5 PocketPC Themes
6 Sky Sports
7 WiFi Hotspot Search
8 BBC Sport
9 Daves PDA
10 Ringtone Charts

Seems like a high percentage of PocketPC links, but I imagine that's a refection of the current user base.

Anyway, I think that the concept of the site is great, in fact I wish I'd thought of it myself. A mobile portal where anyone can add a new site. Sites start out at the bottom of what can potentially be a very long list and can only move up the list by getting hits. Ideally the best of the best in mobile sites, at least by popular opinion, will wind up at the top of the charts in the favored position on the front page above the "fold".

I do foresee some potential problems. One is the obvious possibility for abuse. If news4mobile catches on, unscrupulous content providers will use bots to try to drive worthless ad-farm type sites to the top. This is the same problem that Digg and search engines face already. I also wonder what happens when multiple users add the same link (or slight variants) multiple times.

Obviously these problems can be managed and if they are I can see this site really taking off.

Incidentally, I believe news4mobile is based in Germany. The site defaults to English for me but I can switch to German via a link at the top on the page. Currently, the German side is a little more active with 257 links compared with the English side's 125.

iGloo (igloo.mobi) A mobile site directory for now - but iGloo promises a new mobile social community "soon".

Comcast, 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 selection News stories including Sports, Finance, Technology, Entertainment, Television and Politics sections.

A portal with news, sports , movie reviews , feeds from Slashdot, Engadget and local bloggers. As the name suggests, MyToday can be customized as personal mobile homepage. Registration is by SMS and is limited to users with Indian mobile numbers.

Send email, access your POP email, online games, wap site directory, create and access bookmarks, wap develoment tools

A mobile forum with posts and comments from a eclectic group of blogs including Maximum Geek, Writing on Your Palm, Raving Media and Tibbarerew which cover technology, eBooks, SciFi, gaming and politics and a lot of other interesting stuff.

MWEB is a big South African ISP providing dialup and DSL service.  The MWEB mobile portal offers news, sports and business headlines from 24.com, weather and access to their email for MWEB customers. Source: Mobility.mobi

Optimum.net is a web portal for customers of New York City cable TV and Internet access company Cablevision.  To mobile edition of Optimum has traffic, weather, TV schedules and  move reviews and show times for the New York metropolitan area and allows subscribers access to their email.

News (International, British national, business and entertainment), email, sports, horoscopes TV guide for Great Britian. Wap site directory

Downloads, chat, sports, news, weather, horoscopes. Site is based in New Zealand and has pages devoted to finding shops, events and restaurants in New Zealand. This site's gimmick is that you can reach many of the top level categories by going to a numeric url where the numbers correspond to letters on the phone keys. For eaxmple, if you go to http://836647.com you will get WordDial's tennis page because the letters T E N N I S correspond to 833647 on the phone keys. Cute, but does anyone actually use this feature? More information on WordDial is available at www.worddial.com

News, Sports , Entertainment News and Downloads

Wap site directory, search.

British Site. Excellent selection of quality links.

Local and International news weather, sports, finance and entertainment from the portal of Big Pond Australia's largest ISP.

mDog is Unified Mobility's new brand. mDog mobilizes dozens of mainstream news, sports and entertainment sites which exist on their own urls and are linked from this new portal site. mDog has a couple of new features that look interesting. There's a page that lets you to post to your hosted WordPress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad or Xanga blog. Another nice feature is a well designed front end to eBay that lets you search. bid and track your watched items. It even shows small images of auction items unlike eBay's own mobile site.

Update: 12-Oct-2008 - mDog seems to be dying. Most of the content pages either display a MySQL error or no content.