Wap Review

ESPN is the most popular general sports news site in the US on web and on mobile.  It has extensive coverage of college and profession team sports, tennis, horse racing, motor sports, golf and more. 

ESPN is one of the four TV networks that share the rights to broadcast NFL games. Their web site lets fans follow, in real time, any one of the 14 NFL games typically played on Sunday or the single Monday night game. The mobile site delivers almost all the same information. in a very effective and elegant way. BTW, I'm focusing on the ESPN's NFL coverage but ESPN's Web and mobile sites also cover all the major and many of the minor sports. There is live coverage of baseball and basketball but the NFL coverage is the most detailed.

When you visit the ESPN site, the first thing you see is a list of sports. After you choose NFL and then scores from the front page, you see a list of this weeks games with the scores. Scores of games that are finished are marked with an "F" and clicking on them will lead to a typical after game description of how the game unfolded. But selecting a game in progress brings up a screen showing the score, how much time is left, the down, the position of the ball, which team has procession and the outcome of the last play. These are the essential elements that a football fan needs to follow the game. Below the critical time-sensitive information is a refresh link. The page doesn't refresh itself presumably out of consideration for those of us on metered data plans. Scrolling "below the fold" will reveal secondary information such as game statistics and links to the pre-game story and a page detailing the scoring plays of the current game.

Excellent US-centric sports site. In depth coverage of all major and many minor sports.

Sports coverage with a British Bent. Well-writen, in-depth stories in the best BBC tradition. The BBC's outstanding sports coverage works with all mobile browsers.

Founded a year and a half ago by several ex-AOL and Yahoo executives with seven figures of venture funding, SB Nation (for Sports Blog Nation), is a collection of over 250 individual blogs. The SB blogs offer sports news, scores and fan opinion for  specific teams, leagues or sports. There are SB blogs for most of the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB teams, many colleges plus soccer, golf, tennis, motorsports, cycling, horse racing, boxing and just about every other sport you can think of.

An alternate mobile edition of BBC Sports optimized for off line reading on classic PDA's. It does not use CSS and has fewer but longer pages than the BBC's standard mobile version.

NBC Sports (mobile.nbcsports.com) "Sports" is kind of a misnomer for this site. As of this writing in October, 2006 NBC Sports Mobile is covering only one sport - NFL Football. Last week's baseball World Series was never mentioned on NBC Sports Mobile! Not that it's a bad football site - for pigskin fans the site is very good with lots of game photos, scores, player stats, week by week schedules, game recaps, injury lists and news and features about notable players. The one thing that is lacking is live play-by-play or even scores for games in progress, but for that there is always ESPN Mobile (review). I wonder what they'll do when football season ends, switch to covering the NBA perhaps.

A rather weak sports site. Only covers major US sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, PGA, College football and hoops and professional tennis. Each section has scores and just 3 stories. No photos.

Update 7-Jul-2007: The site has been completely redesigned and now has images, coverage of more sports and more and longer stories.

Time Warner's weekly print sport magazine, Sports Illustrated (SI), finally has a mobile web site of its own. For the last few years, Sports Illustrated content has appeared as a section within CNN Mobile (Time Warner also owns CNN) but now it has its own URL m.si.com. The site covers news from MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, NASCAR, Professional Soccer, Golf, Tennis, Cycling, College Football and Basketball and even occasional coverage of high school sports.

SI's numerous writers and columnists are also featured with in-depth articles and opinion pieces. There's live coverage of Major League Baseball, National Football League and National Basketball Association games. The live coverage is not play by play but incudes frequently updated box scores, a summary of scoring plays and statistics.

cbsSportsline.com: has a new mobile url (cbs.volantis.net/sportsline/) and a new and very attractive site design. The old site was text only, the new one has images resized to browser widths and flashy image gradients. Content's not bad either.

Eurosport (m.eurosport.com) Eurosport Mobile has a new url and a redesigned and much improved site. The front page has been expanded from 5 headlines with daily updates to 10 headlines updated every few minutes and finally there is LIVE coverage, lots of it. At this moment there are live reports from 7 football (soccer to us Yanks) matches, 4 snooker! matches, 2 tennis matches and 2 basketball games. Besides those sports, Eurosport also has extensive coverage of Motor Sports, Cycling, Cricket, Track and Field and Rugby.

Mobile site of The Sporting News, a weekly print sports magazine. Comprehensive coverage of mainstream US sports ( MLB | NCAA Basketball, NCAA Football, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL).

Touch optimized sports portal with live sports scores, news and stats for NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, College Football and Basketball, Motorsports, Soccer, Golf and Tennis. Adapts nicely to smaller screens and non-touch devices as long as they can handle pages as large as 175 KB.

NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Motorsports, Tennis, Soccer and college sports news from AOL's FanHouse, including stats, scores, game results, team schedules and more. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

FlashScore.mobi is a fast livescore website optimized for mobile phones. It shows current live soccer, hockey, tennis, baseball, basketball and American football scores from around the world.  Source Tappity

British based site covers Soccer, Rugby, Cricket, Golf, Track and Field, Tennis, Snooker and Forumula One.

Mobile site of South Africa's SuperSport pay TV network.  The site features Rugby, Soccer, Cricket, Golf and Motorsport news and photos and registers over a million page views per month. Source Mobility.mobi

The National Hockey League (NHL) which is professional hockey in the US and Canada has launched a slick new mobile site at m.nhl.com.  It includes a mobile version of NHL Game Center which displays today's games with live scores in a grid.  Clicking on a game row opens a view with a summary of scoring plays  from that game.  Game Center has a history feature that lets you to skip back a day at a time  to  see a recap of  the scoring of  completed games.  There doesn't appear to be a way to jump directly to a specific day, however.

The site also has  news, scores, standings, statistics and photos.  There is are also  "Videos"  and "MyNHL links which go to a "Coming Soon" page.   I wish designers wouldn't waste clicks and bandwidth on comeons like that.  NHL Mobile adapts nicely to various devices, delivering a simple, mostly text version to basic phones, a more richly formatted one with plenty of  images, as shown in the screenshot) to phones with full web browsers like the Nokia N95 and a very nice iPhone specific  design.  Curiously, Opera Mini gets the dumbphone version. The site design is by Quatro Wireless.

The Score is a  Canadian cable TV sports chanel.  The Score's mobile site covers all major North American professional sports with news, information, highlights, schedules, betting line and live scores. As befits the name, The Score Mobile's front pages consists of the latest live scores for a single sport, currently NBA basketball.  You can customize The Score Mobile to show a different sport or league on the front page and adjust the auto refresh frequency and set your time zone. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

TNSGroup's directory of links to over 275 NCAA Division I University sporting websites. That's over 80% of all Division I schools. The links are arranged by conference so it's easy to find your Alma Matter or school of interest. Great resource for college sports fans.

Official site of the The Southeastern Conference (SEC) which features some of the strongest schools in US college sports including football powerhouse Alabama and perennial NCAA women's basketball champions Tennessee. The conference's mobile site has live scores, news, standings and schedules. Source: Mobile Mammoth

The official mobile site of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, a U.S. based martial arts genre that allows fighters to combine skills and moves from boxing, wrestling, judo, karate in a championship series designed to pick the best fighter from any discipline of martial arts. The site has news, free streaming videos and an event calendar.  Mobile site design is by Quattro Wireless.  Source Tappity

Mobile version of MileSplit.US which covers U.S. high school track & field and cross country with results, rankings, articles, photos, statistics and a forum. Source: Mobility.mobi

Fuel is an extreme sports channel from the Fox television network in the US.  Fuel's mobile site has skateboarding, snowboarding, motocross, surfing, BMX and FMX. news and photos. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Skateboard, Snowboard, Surfing and BMX news, videos, blogs and event calendar.  Slick looking site but page size of over 80 KB maybe a problem for feature phone browsers

Skateboarding magazine with interviews of top skaters, event calendars and result, news and gossip.

Official site of World Wrestling Entertainment, the "sport" of professional wrestling.  The slick looking mobile site has news, results, schedules of TV shows, live events and star appearances. There are ringtones, wallpapers, videos and a subscription text alert service available for purchase. Source Mobility.mobi

Phans is a new mobile site for fans of all the Philadelphia sports teams, the Eagles, Phillies and 76'ers.  The site has a forum-like open blog where all registered users can post. There is also a photo gallery and links to sports news from ESPN. With the Phillies in the World Series this year the site should be pretty lively.

Registration can be done right on the mobile site, a plus.  However, registration requires giving your mobile number. As the site has no privacy policy and doesn't give any indication what the numbers are used for I consider this risky.  Fortunately the mobile number doesn't seem to be verified. I just registered using the number of a telemarketer who SPAMed my mobile.

Well written articles on mostly British sports including cricket and rugby. Also, good Formula One coverage

Full text of articles from the sports section of the Washington Times newspaper

Covers all the professional sports with odds and online pools.

Northland Outdoors features hunting, fishing, recreational sports, classified ads  and destination news for the Upper Midwest including Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and South Dakota.