Wap Review

eBay (m.ebay.com/) At MobileCampSF I met Henri Moissinac, head of eBay's mobile operations. Henri showed me the new version of eBay's mobile web site which is very nice indeed. For one thing searching for items is now smarter, the query "Nokia E61", for example, will list phones rather than the first results will be phones rather than accessories first in the results. The site provides access to My eBay including watch lists, current bids and won items for buyers and items offered and sold for sellers. Of course, you can bid on items from your phone. There's even a message reminding, "If you buy this item, you can pay for it with PayPal on your phone". The site uses content adaption to optimize the experience for different handsets. It ran equally well on the i855's built in Openwave browser, Opera Mini and the N95's Webkit.

Froogle Mobile, a beta release which came out in August, 2005 is a simple price comparison tool. Interestingly, for 2005, Google choose to built Froogle Mobile as a WAP1 site. WAP1 actually isn't a bad idea for a text-only site like Froogle. Virtually every WAP2 device also supports WAP1 so one site can support almost every web enabled phone.

In May 2007, Google renamed Froogle to Google Shopping Search. In 2009 Shopping Search came out of Beta with an xhtml version for the US, UK, Germany and South Korea which includes product images and links to purchase items from third party retailers.

Search hundreds of online retailers for the lowest price.

The mobile edition of the comparison site NexTag helps find the best online prices for computers, gadgets, financial services, travel, automobiles, education and more. Search by keyword or SKU. Android and iOS devices get a special "Touch" version of NexTag that you can use on other devices by visiting advanced.m.nextag.com.

I saw on MobileRead Networks (a great site BTW where I often find the earliest reports of new mobile content) that Yahoo has launch a beta Mobile Shopping site. You can read what Yahoo has to say about it here. I tried the url Yahoo gave, http://shopping.yahoo.com and got 404 (Not Found) on my phones. I then tried on the Openwave, Netfront and Sony-Ericsson WAP emulators, which all support WAP2 which is required according to Yahoo. Only the Netfront emulator was able to load the page. The problem seems to be that Yahoo is using the same url for both the desktop and mobile sites and then using browser detection to redirect mobile users to http://acid1.oa.yahoo.com/mbl/shop. For some reason the redirection, which is unevenly supported by WAP browsers, was failing. A lot of sites do this sort of browser detection to use the same url for desktop and mobile sites or wap1 and wap2 sites. It's a nice idea in principle, adding ease of use but it always fails on some percentage of devices. I really wish sites using this technique would publish alternate urls where you can be sure of getting a specific type of content such as desktop, wml or xhtml-mp. Anyway, once I got to the site I found it simple and intuitive to use. You just enter what you are looking for i.e. "Unlocked Nokia 6200" and it returns a list of items for sale on various e-commerce sites and Ebay. It only gives you a short description, the price and the name (but not the url) of the site. There is no way to visit the seller's site or get more information. At this point it's just a price comparison tool - but it is a beta.

Shopping search engine and price comparison tool for Canadian shoppers. Find the best price at Canadian retailers. Source: Oh Mobile Directory

Mobile interface into the shopping.com low price search. Find the lowest prices for products available from online retailers.  Results are listed in order of bottom line price, lowest first which I like. However "Buy" links lead to vendors full website which isn't very mobile friendly. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

User reviews of Canon products including cameras, printers, binoculars, copiers, scanners and fax machines.

Mobile edition of a big but strangely named South African classified ad site.  Much like Craigslist but limited to South Africa, Junk Mail lets you place free ads or search ads by category, city and keywords. Source: MobiThinking

Craiglist clone with a global reach and a mobile version.  Free classified ads for thousands of cities worldwide. To purchase items you need to contact the seller using a non-click to call phone number! Source: @andrewjb

Here's a new mobile site that helps you find the lowest price for any book. It's a mobile friendly version of bestbookbuys.com. Visit m.bestbookbuys.com and enter the 10 or 13 digit ISBN code found on the back cover of most books and the site will return a list of retailers and prices.

BestBookBuys gets several things right that other mobile price comparison sites seem to stumble with. Prices are prominently displayed in the initial results listing, not buried several clicks deep and include the all important shipping cost.  Results are listed by price from lowest to highest with separate listings for new and used books.

BestBookBuys doesn't sell books directly but does link to the sellers' sites.  Except for Amazon, most online booksellers don't have mobile friendly order pages. BestBookBuys warns you that the seller's site may not work on your phone and provides the option to email  the URL to yourself.

The mobile site is ideal for college students who can visit their overpriced campus bookstore to retrieve the ISBNs of the books they need and enter them on m.bestbookbuys.com.  The site claims savings of up to 95% are possible compared with on-campus prices. I tried a few books and found more modest savings of 5 to 30% off the list prices of current technical books. The service is not limited to textbooks either, I was able to find everything from best selling novels to used copies of long out of print computer books on BestBookBuys' mobile site.

Book price comparison site. Search by keyword or ISBN. Results include both new and used books and sorted by button line price (including shipping)  from low price to high. "Buy Now" button links to bookstore sites, most of which are not mobile friendly.

I wish something like this existed when I was in school! Instead of paying outrageous campus bookstore prices, enter an ISBN to search 200 online bookstores at once. Results are sorted by price from lowest to highest with links to the title on each online bookstore.

PayPal (https://mobile.paypal.com) Not new but I realized I didn't have PayPal Mobile in the WapReview directory, now I do. This is the Paypal mobile account management site which lets you view your balance, change your pin and send money to any email address or mobile phone number. Paypal seems to be the best of the widely supported systems for off portal mobile payments thanks to it's huge number of users and all numeric login using your phone number plus a numeric pin that you choose.

Zeer is a new web (zeer.com) and mobile (m.zeer.com) site dedicated to groceries. It's full of information about branded food products. With Zeer you search for a product like "Corn Flakes" or "Green Beans" and get listings with ingredients, nutritional information and user reviews. Just about any branded edible or drinkable item seems to be indexed including alcoholic beverages. You can also create and manage grocery shopping lists using Zeer. When you add a item to your Zeer shopping list it becomes a link to Zeer's information page for that product so you can quickly revisit the ingredients, nutritional information and reviews.

Zeer on the mobile web contains the core of the service's features. Shopping lists can be viewed, and you can search for products and read some, but not all of the product information on the full site.

The biggest limitation of Zeer Mobile for me is that the nutritional information only includes Serving Size, Total Calories and Calories from Fat. Why not include it all, I want to know about Carbs, Sodium and Saturated Fat too. As the nutritional information is a separate screen in the mobile version there's no reason not to include the complete list, it's only a few lines of text, shorter than the ingredients list in most cases.  I'd also like to be able to register for Zeer using the mobile site and the option of logging with an easy to type user ID or PIN rather than  an email address. Typing @ signs on most phones  is an unnecessary usability hurdle.

One of the better mobile shopping sites. mPoria Mall works a little like Yahoo Shopping. You do a search and are offered a choice of items from partner stores, some of which are well known establishments like Buy.com and GameStop but others are small merchants similar to Yahoo StoreFronts. The Mall is a full fledged shopping center with all sorts of merchandise from books to clothing and jewelery.

The site is quite well designed with small fast loading pages and wizard-style navigation. There are some nice touches to enhance usability. Accesskeys (numeric shortcuts) provide one key menu selection and text fields use the input-format attribute to force the phone keypad to numeric mode for items like phone number and zipcode. Instead of entering your shipping and billing address you can enter a landline phone number and mPoria does a reverse lookup to fill in the address. This only works for listed numbers of course, but it's handy for shipments to a work address, for example. Context-sensitive help is available on all screens.

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Are your children's toys safe? This site helps you identify dangerous toys that have been recalled and find safe ones in the shops. The main feature is a searchable database of toys that have been recalled for safety issues. Just enter the name of a toy, like "Barbie", and get a list of all recalls listed with the US Consumer Products Safety Commission. There are also tips on buying safe toys and information on various country's labeling and certification standards for toys.

A recent dotMobi Site of the Week pick, RecalledToys.mobi is another site providing a mobile friendly front-end to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission's database of product safety recalls.  In spite of the name this one covers household and outdoor products and sports and recreation equipment in addition to toys. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

As the holiday shopping rush kicks off in earnest this week, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an independent non-profit consumer activist organization, has launched a mobile web site, ToySafety.mobi. It offers tips on how to identify unsafe toys and a list of 16 toys that are unsafe due to choking hazards, excessively loud noises or toxic materials.

Shoppers do need to be careful when buying toys as the hazards presented by some of these products are very real, with the potential to seriously harm and even kill children. I think that it is great that the US PIRG has made this information available in mobile friendly format allowing shoppers to check products they are considering while they are in the store.

I also like Safetoy.mobi, which I covered last year. It's a mobile search engine that taps into the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of over 20,000 unsafe toys recalled since 2007.

This iPhone site from Parent's Choice, a US non-profit that reviews and recommends toys is quite usable in all mobile browsers that support JavaScript, including Opera Mini.  Search is by category, child's age and price.  Results include a photo, description and buttons to email the listing and to purchase the item from an online merchant, generally Amazon or Simon & Shuster.  The link's to Simon and Shuster go to the publisher's non-mobile home page rather than to the toy's item page, hurting usability. Source: Taptu Jan. Touch Web Report

Here's another in the rapidly growing field of mobile shopping sites. It's mShopperand is billed as a price comparison tool. The idea is that when you are shopping at a brick and mortar store and see something you are considering buying, you use mShopper to compare the merchant's price with what online stores are charging. The comparison is limited to mShopper's partner stores but there are currently oven 100 partners including Amazon, B&H Photo, Walmart, Target and dozens of smaller online retailers so the selection is actually pretty good.

MShopper seems to have put some thought into making the search process as simple as possible using a phone keypad. After you click the first link, labeled "PriceIt" on the mShopper mobile web home page you are presented with a search form with two fields where you enter the first few letters of the product's brand and model number respectively. mShopper then does a sub-string search and comes up with a list of matching items. I thought the relevance of the results was quite good.

Unfortunately, the experience started to break down at this point. I tried searching for the Sony W80 camera, The first problem was that the same camera appeared in the list multiple times with different prices. But you can't actually see the prices in the list, it takes two clicks on each item to find the actual price. After a lot of clicking I found what seemed to be the best price on the camera. There didn't seem to be any way to see the shipping cost without registering a credit card and starting the purchasing process. Shipping costs vary widely online, so you really need the bottom line price to do effective comparison shopping.

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Online shopping search and price comparison for New Zealand based brick and motor and online stores.  Purchase by click to call number or through a link to the merchant's web site which is often not mobile friendly. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

How much is your phone worth?  U.K based CeX's phone valuation site will tell you, at least for GSM phones that are either unlocked or locked to one of the UK operators.  If you like the price, CeX will buy your phone as well. Source: GoMo News

Australian based site rating products on a variety of measures of their manufacturer's business ethics, including use of sustainable agriculture and avoidance of animal testing, child labor and genetically engineered foods. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Barcle is a recent entrant, launched in November 2007, to the crowded field of mobile web price comparison and shopping. They have 900 merchant partners including Best Buy, TigerDirect and B. Dalton. This week Walmart, the biggest US retailer, partnered with Barcle.

The "Bar" in the name refers to barcodes. You can search by entering the 8, 12 or 13 digit number that appears under the UPC barcode on most consumer products. This is a great idea for mobile as it's much easier to key numbers than words with a mobile keypad particularly if the mobile website switches the phone's input mode to numeric only in the barcode field.

Barcle fails to exploit that opportunity by using the same input field for both barcodes and product name searches. The site's barcode database also seems to be incomplete. I had limited success using barcodes with Barcle. I tried the codes from eight current products that are available online; a couple of mobile phones, two books, two music CDs, some brand name vitamins and a digital camera. Of the eight products, Barcle found only three (one phone, a CD and a book) when using barcodes and two more (the vitamins and the camera) if I typed in the product name.

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Shop Bazzar is a directory of fashion boutiques in New York, London, Paris, Milan and Hong Kong. Although published by Harper's Bazzar, which is noted for it's fashion photography the site is disappointingly text only.

A new shopping search site. Searches both online and local brick and mortar stores, though most hits seem to be to online sites currently. Slifter also has a downloadable Java application that doesn't seem to add much value compared with the web based one. If you register you can save you shopping list and location and send links to bargains by email or SMS. Registration requires a mobile number, something I consider risky especially with new, unknown sites like Slifter. I was able to register with an obviously bogus number.

Mogoso (mogoso.com) is a search site that simultaneously searches Yelp for stores and restaurants and also does an Amazon shopping search. The results link to reviews Amazon or Yelp reviews. It's a strange combination, while Amazon will sell you almost anything and you can review anything on Yelp, those sites specialize in books and restaurants respectively. I suppose I might want to simultaneously search for sushi bars and sushi cookbooks it doesn't seem very likely. Grumbling aside, I do find Mogoso's search interface and results pages cleaner and and easier to navigate than either Amazon's or Yelp's. For one thing, searching for restaurants by zip code actually works on Mogoso by returning results by distance, Yelp (review) first returns results sorted by rating from throughout the metropolitan area, you have to click a link and wait to find the nearest ones. With  Amazon, Mogoso includes excepts of reviews right on the initial results page rather making you click through to read the review.