Wap Review

The 2009 Formula One season has gotten off to a surprising start with Jenson Button and the new Brawn team winning three of the first four races. An amazing turn around for Brawn which is the new name for the ne'er-do-well Honda team.

Also new this season is a major redesign of F1-Live.com's mobile web site at m.f1-live.com. F1-Live is part of the Montpelier, France based Racing-Live.com group, which was acquired last year by ESPN. The redesign is by Scimob which is also in Montpelier.

The new mobile site has the full F1-Live news feed, plus photos, videos, race results, calendar, driver and constructors championship standings and live commentaries on race days. The site uses browser detection and adaptation to provide an optimized experience to the iPhone, Android and other advanced phones as well as basic feature phones. The mobile site is available in 3 languages.

The Racing-Live family of sites, which also includes Rally-Live and Moto-Live.com, is the biggest of the dedicated motorsports sites with over three million monthly unique visitors.

F1-Live has long been my favorite site for F1 news and live coverage, although I liked it better before quite a bit of the content was put out behind a pay wall a couple of years ago. It's still the best source of F1 news with frequent daily updates. Fortunately the mobile edition is completely free including the videos and live reports.

If Moto-GP or road rallying is tie thing check out F1-Live Mobile's sister sites, m.rally-live.com and m.moto-live.com

The BBC generally does an outstanding job with their mobile web sites and the Beeb's dedicated F1 section is no exception. With several original stories every day and live lap by lap coverage of both qualifying and races, the BBC site is one of my favorite F1 mobile destination. The BBC has WAP2 (xhtml), WAP1(wm) and "PDA" versions of all their content. The PDA variant uses fewer pages with more text per page than the others to otimize it for sideloading using programs like Avantgo or Plucker but it also works well with full-web browsers like  Opera Mini. Text content of all three versions is identical but images on the on wml and xhtml editions are rather small (66x49 pixels) while the PDA edition gets images up to 202 px wide.

Small page size and minimal small images make the WAP version of the BBC's F! coverage ideal for users on slow or expensive networks. Text is generally identical to the BBC's PDA edition including live coverage of races and qualifying.

Speed is a North American cable and satellite TV channel focused on motor racing, especially NASCAR and Forumula 1 but also covering Moto-GP, WRC and auto and motorcycle racing in general along with features on high performance cars and bikes both current and vintage. 

The channel's web and mobile sites are a nice surprise.  A lot of cable channels run their Web sites primarily as a promotional tool for their TV presence with schedules, talent bios and teasers about upcoming shows and not much else. SPEEDtv.com however, is a pure motorsports news site with race results, series standings, motor racing news, reader polls and reviews and photos of fast cars and motorcycles. It's great content for the motor racing fan and there is a lot of it too, well over 100 in-depth news items with photos.

The cable TV sports network's mobile F1 section has some of the best and most complete post-race wrap up stories as well as in-depth coverage of testing, qualifying and the inevitable controversies over regulations and alleged improper driving. Each story is illustrated by a well chosen action photo from the event or story being covered. The photos are resized to fit various mobile browser's screen widths. Like all of Eurosport, the F1 pages are available in 8 languages; English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian and Chinese.

A new Formula 1 site with F1 news in brief, results, standings, photos, videos and free ringtone downloads

m.Revvs.net is a new motorsports mobile web site which presents excepts (typically the first paragraph of a longer story) pulled from news sources around the world. Each story is illustrated with a 128x128px image. There's a lot of news on this site, with around 60 news items appearing on the site at any time, probably more than any other mobile motorsports site. Revvs covers all areas of the sport with dedicated sections for F1, MotoGP and NASCAR and an "Other Stores" section with items on A1GP, SP2, WRC British Superbikes, etc. Page size is low, about 2KB of text and 10KB of images per page ensuring compatibility with virtually any web capable phone.

The only problem I have with Revvs is that the stories are excerpts and to read the full story you need to click on the "Source" links at the bottom of each page - which link directly to full web versions of the story. The linked pages are almost always too large to load on a typical feature phone - which seems to be the market segment Revvs is targeting. Even trying to load them could cause a nasty billing shock for users on metered data plans.

Revvs needs to offer the option to open external links in a transcoder such as Google's GWT. Google is apparently OK with 3rd party sites linking through their transcoder, even high volume sites like Taptu are doing it. It does need to be optional though. I use a simple interstitial page on wapreview.mobi that offers users a choice of several transcoders or no transcoding at all. The choice of transcoders is probably overkill but the option to not transcode is essential as transcoders pretty much destroy the browsing experience for users with full web mobile browsers like Opera Mini.

Autosport (wmda.eu) is a slick mobile magazine covering mostly European motor racing including F1, F3, DTM, (the German Touring Car Masters series) and A1 Grand Prix. Results, news , driver and circuit profiles are free, streaming 3gp video is available for a fee although I could not find the rates or anyway to sign up on the site.

Yahoo UK's F1 coverage. Full coverage on Formula One news from the wire services

The ultimate F1 mobile trivia site. Up to date standings for the current season plus results, driver bios, statistics and more going back to 1950.

Very complete calendar of upcoming autoracing events around the world. The site also has a few free vintage racing wallpapers for download in various sizes

Bike EXIF post news articles, reviews and photos daily covering the coolest motorcycles including new and classic cafe racers, custom motorcycles, and vintage track bikes. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

News, photos, calendar, standings and live comentary on the Moto-Gp series.

PistonHeads mobile carries the full text of selected articles and road tests for the U.K. based motoring magazine along with user forums and classified cars for sale ads. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile friendly user forum for fans of 4x4s and off road driving, racing and rock crawling. Average page size 50KB.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Motoring Rally news, photos, calendar, standings and live commentary from ESPN Racing-Live.

Reviews and Photos from the monthly print auto enthusiast magazine.

Specifications and photos of classic and modern high performance cars. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile edition of Automobile Magazine features reviews and photos of high performance, luxury and "green" cars. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile online edition of CARtoday, a South African print magazine for auto enthusiasts.  Content includes news, reviews and driving analyses of new models and videos of high (and not so high) performance cars in action.  You can also purchase and download wallpapers and exhaust note ringtones!  Source Oh! Mobile Directory

The UK Guardian has a dedicated Motorsports page with unique and well-written race wrap-ups, driver interviews and analysis of goings-on in the sport.

Sky has a good F1 page with news, F1 calendar and championship standings in text-only wml format and a chtml version with small (150px wide) photos.

Good coverage of the Formula One Grand Prix racing season including team and driver profiles and some photos.

Official site of the IRL (Indy Racing League) the sanctioning body for the highest level of U.S. open wheel racing.  The mobile site has live timing and commentary for all  IndyCar Series races, qualifying sessions and official practice days, driver bios, standings, race calendar, track-side weather reports, photos text alerts and polls. The site was a 2009 Webby Awards nominee.

With the 2008 NASCAR season now underway. Sprint has re-launched their NASCAR site. Fortuntately you don't need to be a Sprint subscriber to use the site. You will find NASCAR results, news, calendars, rules. trivia and polls on the site. For Sprint customers there are also downloads; ringers, callback tones, a game and a free screensaver.

MSNBC has a nice little NASCAR stockcar racing section with results, interviews and photos

Part of ESPN, this site has the usual F1 stories and press releases. Also covers the Nascar and CART series.

Part of First4F1.com. History, results and driver bios for each team.

Mobile edition of motocrosstracks.com a directory of motocross tracks and off-road riding areas in the USA and Canada. Browse by state or search for a track by name (but not zip or city/state).

Official site of the Ferrari Formula One racing team. The site has news, photos, driver profiles, technical details, the 2007 F1 calendar with circuit maps and free downloadable wallpapers and ring tones. I'm not ready for an F1 racing motor in full song as MY ringtone but I'm sure some one is.

Update 6-May-2009: Site is up  but with the 2009 F1 season well under way, the Ferrari mobile is still carring a message that it's "suspended during the holidays"