Wap Review

Engadget covers consumer electronics with news and reviews. Part of the Weblogs, Inc blog network Engadget shares the same basic layout with it's stablemates. They are all similar with a front page that's a list of 10 titles with brief descriptions. Next and Previous links allow you to see more titles. Clicking a title brings up the item as a new page with the full text and all images from the item. Items don't seem to be broken into pages but these blogs tend to have frequent short items so the text size of pages should not be an issue. Image size is another matter. All images on the mobile platforms are in their original size. While some of the Weblogs sites like Cinematical tend to use small images, a recent Engadget post featured an 860x741px image. There are millions of people using the mobile web with screens only 128 or even 96 pixels wide. Even if a browser can re-size and show large images the load time is unacceptable on anything less than a 3G connection. The only browsers that can seamlessly handle these pages are the proxy based ones like Opera Mini, Novarra's nWeb or Xiino where the proxy re-sizes images before sending them to the browser. Weblogs needs to create smaller images for these mobile sites to make them usable on mainstream mobile browsers.

It looks like the hugely popular Lifehacker.com blog, which recommends time saving technology and techniques to make yourself more productive, now has a mobile site. The announcement is here. There is no mobile specific url, Lifehacker is using browser detection at lifehacker.com to deliver mobile content to phones - at least the ones it recognizes. I played around with feeding Lifehacker a dozen different mobile user-agent headers and Lifehacker delivered mobile content to the majority of them. The Ericsson T68 and Motorola V710 were not detected and got PC content. I strongly believe that mobile sites which use browser detection should also include a link to the mobile site at the top of their PC pages and another link to the PC site at the bottom of each mobile page so that users can override the browser detection if needed or desired.

The mobile Lifehacker pages are a bit of a mixed bag from the standpoint of mobile usability. All the text and pictures from the PC Lifehacker items are present which is good but the pages are on the heavy side for anything less than a smartphone. The front page contains summaries of 20 articles and 10 images for a total page weight of 100 KB. The mobile guidelines from the W3C, Luca Passani's GAP and dotMobi all recommend mobile pages under 20 KB and with good reason as popular phones like the GSM RAZR won't load pages much over 10 KB let alone 100 KB. At least the images on the mobile front page are resized to 120px wide. However once you leave the front page and go into the articles, you will run into larger images, as large as 475 px wide, exceeding the screen size of all but a handful of phones.

If you visit Lifehacker's mobile site with a smartphone, connected PDA or any phone running a full web browser like Opera Mini, page size and image size won't be an issue but a lack of features may disappoint. Many recent smartphones like the Motorola Q, Cingular 8125 and Nokia E61 have full QWERTY keyboards making commenting on blogs relatively quick and easy - but it's not possible to leave a comment or even view existing comments using the mobile Lifehacker site. Any of these full web browsers could do a credible job of rendering Lifehacker's full PC page but they can't reach the full site because the browser detection delivers the mobile edition.

Let me offer a life hack of my own for anyone wanting to enjoy Lifehacker on their phone in the most efficient and productive way - Google Reader. Lifehacker has a full RSS feed, set that up in Google reader and use the mobile edition of Reader to access it from the phone. Reader even lets you click through to a transcoded for mobile version of the original item where you can read the comments.  Even with Reader you can't leave a comment, the Javascript driven Lifehacker comment form is too much for the Google transcoder.

Silicon Valley gossip blog - reformatted for mobile by FeedM8.

Ars Technica which is Latin for "art of technology" is a big tech news site covering computing, science and gaming with breaking news items and in depth articles.

The recently launched Ars Technica mobile edition includes most of the full site's content including its dedicated Apple, Microsoft, Open Source, Gaming, Business and Tech Policy sections. The only part of the site that isn't mobilized is the forums which unfortunately is where the comments on articles are.

The site's modest 25 KB page size means that it should work with most mobile browsers. Pages are formatted to fit 320px and wider screens so horizontal scrolling will be needed on many devices. A curious omission is that there are no navigation links to several of the news sections including, surprisingly for a mobile site, the Telecom section. The missing sections do have mobile versions but the only way to reach them seems to be by keying the section's URL like arstechnica.com/telecom/

Peter Cashmore's Mashable! is a high-traffic news blog covering social networking, web 2.0 and mobile.

I suspect the site's name comes from "Mashup" - combing two (or more) web services to create a new site or service - think of TwitterVision which combines Ttwitter feeds with the Google Maps API to show Twitter updates as text bubbles on a world map. Mashable does cover mashups, especially ones involving popular social networks. But Mashable is a lot more than mashups, with 20 or more news items a day,  a MarketPlace section for job postings and Web 2.0 related services for sale or wanted and a page listing invites to startups in closed beta.  There's also a daily podcast, usually with the founder or ceo of a hot startup. A popular feature of Mashable is Mashcodes a repository of free MySpace themes, games and plugins. And Mashable itself is a social network, with personal profiles, photo page friends, status updates and messaging.

On July 1oth, Mashable launched a mobile edition at m.mashable.com Unsurprisingly it's a mashup, using MoFuse to generate a mobile version of from RSS feeds of the Mashable's News, MarketPlace and Invites sections.  MoFuse is used by a number of sites including ReadBurner and MobileActive (review). It's also one of the services I reviewed in 4 Easy Ways to Make your Blog Mobile Friendly. Since I wrote that piece, MoFuse has added a nicely formatted iPhone version. Another recent enhancement is image resizing,  where images are reformatted to a maximum size equal to the screen width. That should make MoFuse pages compatible with more phones, but I'd like to see MoFuse implement page splitting too.  As it is, the page delivered to mobile can still be quite large,  one of the news items on Mashable today contains 17 KB of text plus 41 KB of images. That's  no problem for any Smartphone and many feature phones but too big to display completely on something like a RAZR V3.  The W3C and dotMobi generally suggest a maximum of 20 KB text (10 KB markup plus another 10 KB of images) for pages intended to work on any phone.

Mobile Mashable is a subset of the full site but a fairly complete one, offering the full content of  the news, marketplace and invites sections.  If you want to get to the full site and your browser can handle it, Mashable doesn't force mobile browsers to the mobile version, although if you use a PC browser to visit m.mashable.com, MoFuse displays the content in a mobile widget.

The famous and popular "News for Nerds" site in handheld friendly format. Links to non-handheld friendly pages.

Blogger and author (Naked Conversations) Robert Scoble, who claims to have interviewed more than 3200 geeks, is an alumni of Userland, Microsoft and Fast Company and is currently working on Rackspace's Building 43, a social and publishing community for tech visionaries. His personal blog, Scobilizer is frequently updated, well written and outspoken. It is one of the most widely read and influential of personal tech blogs.

Steve Rubel, who's a senior VP at the big PR agency Edelman, has a Technorati Top 100 blog, Micro Persuasion. Steve writes about new technology as it applies to marketing, a subject that often involves covering new mobile services. Lately, he's been doing much of his writing on Facebook and Twitter as well as posting to del.icio.us and Flickr. A few days ago Steve rolled out his Tumblelog, The Steve Rubel Lifestream at steverubel.com with a mobile edition on Plusmo. It's a site that rolls up Steve's blog posts, his Flickr and Del.icio.us feeds, Twitter tweets and Facebook notes in one place.

Personal blog of Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs. Jason covers an eclectic range of topics but the emphasis seems to be the web business especially the hot trends, startups and social oriented "Web 2.0" stuff.

Personal blog of Irish serial entrepreneur (MaxRoam, Twitterfone, Allfreecalls.net, Roam4free), Pat Phelan. Frequently updated and packed with industry news, gossip and Pat's take on the latest handsets, software and services,  "Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecoms" is a must read for everyone in mobile.

The blog of Dave Winer, founder of Userland and Manila, who is generally credited with being the originator of RSS and thus blogging. Dave's blog is highly opinionated and often amusing.

Popular tech blog ReadWriteWeb, is now available in a full featured mobile friendly format at m.readwriteweb.com.  The mobile view was created with and is hosted by Mobify.  It includes all the articles, with images, from the PC version. Viewing and leaving coments is fully supported in the mobile view. Images are re-sized to fit various mobile browsers.  The site's front page is about 100 KB in size (individual item pages are generally smaller) and works well with smartphones, Opera Mini and many modern feature phone browsers.

ReadWriteWeb, which has been around since 2003, specializes in news and analysis of web sites, web based services and web technology with an emphasis on social media and mobile.

OSNews is a web site that covers just about every operating system past and present. There are the expected articles on the latest Microsoft Vista delay, the backlash against the Intel Apple and new releases of various Linux distros, but to me the real heart of OSNews is it's coverage of obsolete and obscure OS's. It's a great site for anyone who has been playing with computers for a while and wants to know what's up with the old systems like Amiga or BeOS or even Apple II DOS these days. The site is also a must read if your are interested in upstart and underdog modern OS's like Syllable or SkyOS. OSNews strives to cover all operating systems including embedded, mobile and PDA OS's. There are quite a few mobile related articles. There's even coverage of mobile and PC browsers, which makes sense as browsers are now computing environments and performing many of the functions traditionally associated with operating systems.

To support their readers on a wide range of systems, OSNews has versions of their sites that are viewable on virtually any browser including mobile browsers. This page describes the support for numerous old, text-only and mobile devices. Using browser detection, OSNews will deliver one of four different versions of the site.

1) The normal web version at http://www.osnews.com/ with advertising and large images, formatted for modern web browsers with horizontal resolution of at least 640px.

2) A lighter but still full featured cHTML version for most other browsers including text-only browsers like Lynx, older graphical desktop browsers like NCSA Mosaic, PDA browsers and most mobile browsers (first two images). This version contains almost all the content of the web version including the full text of all the News, Features, Interviews and Editorials sections. On mobiles the site will display without horizontal scrolling on any browser with at least a 128x128 resolution and the ability to handle pages up to 32 KB in size. The mobile page is at the same http://www.osnews.com/ url as th PC site. It is displayed if a mobile, text only or limited browser is detected. There is no alternate url if your device isn't detected properly. If that happens OSNews would like you to contact them with you devices User Agent string which you can get by visiting this page so that they can add it to their browser detection routines.

3) An even lighter cHTML version at http://www.osnews.com/jphone.php consisting of a main page containing titles and links to the light version of the 15 latest items (last image). SonyEricsson browsers get this page as do most phones on Japan's J-Phone network as both these browsers have page-size and other limitations.

4) Finally there is a WAP1 page for wml-only phones at http://wap.osnews.com/. It has the same top 15 stories but the links are to short summaries of the articles which in turn contain links to the light cHTML full text version.

Of these four versions, the second, full featured mobile one is the most interesting to me. It's not an xhtml-mp site, it's cHTML. That makes sense as the page is intended for use with a wide variety of browsers many of which have no support for xhtml and CSS. cHTML ("Compact HTML") which is usually associated with i-Mode is a subset of HTML 3.2 and is displayable by just about any browser except wml-only ones. Layout is done using tables rather than CSS. While tables have a bad reputation these days and typical table-based desktop sites render poorly on small screens, OSNews uses tables with a width of 100% so they scale to fill the screen and are mostly one cell wide (except for a 3x2 navigation menu) to create a nice stacked and bordered presentation of the articles and their titles.

I was amazed at how well the site displays on mobile devices. I've always though that you had to use xhtml-mp and CSS to achieve this level of quality on wap2 devices. But here's a site done in HTML 3.2 with a table based layout that is both very attractive and highly usable on everything from fairly low end phones to old Palm OS browsers to Lynx. I asked OSNews about this and got a great reply from Eugenia Loli-Queru who not only writes for OSNews (frequently on mobile topics) but also designed the mobile pages.

Eugenia says,

"cHTML is much more compatible than CSS and XHTML. I mean, look at the big-4 desktop browsers (IE, Safari, Gecko, Opera). Writing anything in CSS usually doesn't render the same on all 4. The situation is even worse on mobile phones where the browsers have very limited memory and CSS requires much more memory and CPU to compute than plain HTML because the layout is not "fixed". For example, saying that a table is 80% instead of 200pixels requires a lot more cpu to compute, even if it sounds trivial to web developers. My husband works for Openwave.com and he is the browser architect of the Openwave browser. He has taught me how to avoid such problems. :)

Then again, think how a browser is created. The developer has to start from the basics. And that means plain HTML, then some CSS, and much later some javascript. Most browsers only manage to do well only the first and easiest part of the whole thing: plain HTML. And this is the reason why cHTML will always be the best choice for compatibility between browsers (including desktop browsers). XHTML and CSS are cool on paper, very interesting technologies, but in the real-life mobile web, they are too expensive in terms of complexity, memory and CPU required and for the time being, it's best to be avoided."

When you look around the mobile web today you will see that many mobile site designers are still building new mobile sites with a subset of HTML rather than xhtml-mp/CSS. The 31 new mobile sites that I wrote about recently are HTML, as are MacRumors, Windows Live and Mobile MSN.

Incidentally there's a lively debate, with Eugenia a major contributor, going one over at PocketPCThouhts on this very issue. It started as a discussion of the merits of the new .mobi domain. One of the requirements for .mobi sites is to use xhtml-mp, CSS and no layout tables.

As a counterpoint, take a look at this showcase of supposedly .mobi compliant sites hosted by mTLD, the .mobi registrar. I say supposedly because several aren't actually xhtml-mp (OK, they're xhtml-strict - close but no cigar) and one, CityGuide.mobi is actually cHTML! I notice that most of these sites are very plain and dull visually compared with OSNews.

Crunchgear is a gadget blog that's part of the TechCrunch empire. The site is using Andy Moore's new WordPress Mobile Plugin to detect mobile devices and deliver a mobile formatted version. Mobilization doesn't seem to be extended to TechCrunch and MobileCrunch yet.

Update: Crunchgear no longer offers a mobile edition! The links above points to a transcoded version and a mobilized copy of the Crunchgear RSS feed..

One of the top news blogs covering personal technology and consumer electronics, Slashgear now has a mobile edition. It's very full-featured and includes all the posts, comments,reviews, columnists and videos from the desktop version. There's no pagination and images up to 540 px wide make this a resource intensive mobile site with pages up to a megabyte in size.

Long before Engadget and Gizmodo there was Geek.com.  The tech news site has been around since at least 1998 and is still a good source of tech news.  There even used to be a mobile version called PDAGeek that seemed to disappear a couple of years ago. It looks like it's back minus the dated PDA moniker in the form of this attractive and usable site.  Geek.com's mobile site carries the full text of all the hundreds of items on Geek.com's PC site divided into categories including Apple, Gadgets, Mobile, Games and Chips.  Page sizes under 20 KB insure that the site will work on almost any phone.

CNet News mobile edition

News, reviews and columns from PC Magazine's website. Full text of articles but no images. Produced by mdog

This is an oldie which has been down for awhile but seems to be available and updated again. It's the same text-only format as PC World's Avantgo site which dates back many years; six tech news items updated daily. The items themselves are the full text of the same articles on PC Worlds main site. Not bad, but can we have more items please and and a maybe few images resized for mobile?

Now you can read articles from the venerable popular science magazine on your mobile phone. SciAm's mobile site has several dozen complete articles from the magazine's full web site. Articles are paginated and images are resized resulting in a highly usable site that works well with any mobile browser.

Insightful and accurate reviews of the latest technical stuff written with a unique personal style.

Fast Company is a print and online business magazine focused on technology, innovation and social responsibility.  And now there's a mobile version of Fast Company at m.fastcompany.com. 

The mobile web design, which is by Crisp Wireless, generally does a good job of resizing images and splitting up pages so that the site works on anything from the iPhone to old wml-only devices. A lot of mobile web development shops seem to focus on high-end devices and end up producing pages that won't even load on the feature phones that account for 70% of mobile web use according to Comscore.

I do have one beef with the mobile version of FastCompany.  Where are the videos?  FastCompany is probably best known on the web for its video interviews of tech luminaries by Robert Scoble.  The videos are hosted on FastCompany.tv but linked to from the main site. 

Scoble recently left FastCompany, reportedly after Seagate declined to renew its $1 million/year sponsorship of Scoble's show. It looks like video production at FastCompany has totally halted after Scoble's departure with no new videos released since March 5th. Video was such a major part of FastCompany's online content, I hope this doen't mean the end for fastCompany.tv. I'm also disappointed that the previously produced videos don't seem to be available in a mobile friendly format.

 

Science and technology news for non-scientists from the New Scientist magazine.

Online edition of Discover Magazine, which covers science news, technology, space, environment, health medical and more. Mobile view by Mobify.

The NextWeb is a news blog focused on the web services and technology. The main blog is divided into numerous subject area, brand and geographic specific channels like Apple, Google, Social Media, US, UK and Asia. 

Curiously, the mobile version of NextWeb (created with WPtouch) is delivered only to iPhones, Android and WebOS devices and Opera Mini. BlackBerrys, dumb phones and Symbian devices get the 600 KB desktop version, which they are unlikely to be able to load, instead of the 70 KB mobile one!

T3ch H3lp publishes tech tutorials and reviews as articles, videos and podcasts. Featured topics include Apple, Microsoft, Gadgets, the iPhone and Gaming. Mobile view by Mobify

ZDNet, the online tech news, reviews and software download site, also hosts a network of around 45 blogs including several well known and popular ones like Mary Jo Foley's All about Microsoft and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes's Hardware 2.0. There's a list and links to all 45 on the Blogs tab of the ZdNet Homepage. I knew that at least one ZDNet Blog, Matthew Miller's The Mobile Gadgeteer, had a mobile edition and it turns out that all of them do.

There's a mobile front end at m.zdnet.com which lists and links to the most recent posts accross all 45 blogs.  When you go to www.zdnet.com with a mobile browser you are redirected to m.zdnet.com.  This happens even if you're using a full web browser like Opera or Nokia WebKit. Of all mobile browsers, only the iPhone escapes this forced redirection.  There doesn't seem to be any way to tell ZdNet that you want the full version on your mobile. The problem is that only part of ZdNet.com is mobilized and these full-web mobile browsers could easily display the parts that aren't.  All that's needed is a link, something like pc.zdnet.com that bypasses browser detection to go directly to the full ZdNet site. More...

Part of Ziff Davis' PCMag.com Network, AppScout is a news blog offering breaking news, tips, and reviews of desktop and mobile software and webapps.

The mobile edition, created by mDog includes the full content and photos from all recent AppSout posts including read-only comments. There's a bug in the site's browser detection code which throws a 403 "Not Found" error with some mobile browsers when visiting appsout.com or mobile.appscout.com. Use mobile.appscout.com/htmlsite/ as a work around.

TechMeme editor, former writer at MakeUseOF and one of India's most popular tech bloggers, Mahendra Palsule's personal blog. He writes some great stuff on technology and especially the social Web. A good example is his latest piece, "What We Really Need: Discovering Whom To UnFollow" on how Twitter's huge spam problem is undermining it's "discover new people" feature.

A frequently updated blog written by two IT professionals. TechMisco offers tips and tutorials along with insightful analysis of tech trends and issues with an emphasis on security and legal questions,

Marketing professional Danielle Gatsos' mobile friendly personal blog covers social media marketing, video, graphic design, mobile and digital technology and AIDS research.

Kenyan tech entreprener Simeon Oriko's personal blog covering tech, Africa, politics and art among other things.

Touch Optimized mobile edition of the UK's most popular gadget review site covering cameras, phones, audio and toys. Average page size 120KB.

An independent news blog covering Sony Corporation including both business news and product reviews. The mobile version was created with Crowd Favorite's WordPress Mobile Edition Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Tech News Tube is a tech news agregator that gathers the latest headlines from Ars Technica, Digg, Engadget, GigaOM, Gizmodo, Slashdot, The Register, Tom's Hardware, VentureBeat and dozens of other popular sites. A "Blue Dot of Freshness" marks itmes that are less than an hour old. Clicking a headline opennes a summary page which also has lines that let you save a link to the conntent on mobile social bookmarking site PhoneFavs or view the full content on the original site or a mobile transcoded version of the content.

Mobile edition of Electricpig.co.uk, a popular tech news gadget blog created using the MobilePress plugin for WordPress.  Source gerrymoth

19-Jul-2009: Electricpig seems to have switched from MobilePress to Mippin for their mobile edition.

Tech vibes is a news blog targeted at technology professionals in Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria, Seattle, Portland, and Denver-Boulder. The site carries tech news and listings for local events and job openings. The clean mobile interface was created with Mobify.

 

 

Tech tips blog with tech tips, gadget and software reviews and tips and tricks for Windows, Symbian, Java and blogging. Mobile version created with MoFuse.

A beautiful and lively blog discussing and celebrating typography.  Includes tips and tutorials for font designers and users. Source: @mobify

Techdirt is Mike Masnick's blog covering technology and media. Mike's a very good tech business analyst, particularly in the areas of privacy and intellectual property and he's made Techdirt a hot property. It's on CNET's Blog 100 list, the Technorati 100 and lots of other "best of tech blogs" type lists. There's a "Lite" version (techdirt.com/index_lite.php) that works in mobile browsers.

Originally the front page contained the full text of the 20 latest articles - about 60 KB's worth. which meant that it was too big to load on many mobiles. But after I blogged about my concerns, Techdirt made some adjustments cutting the number of posts per page to 3 which reduced page size to only 10KB. The format of Techdirt Lite is rather cool, it's the simplest possible UI, just open the site, start reading and read until you've had enough. I don't think pagination hurts the reading experience, having to click on Next every 9000 characters or so is no great hardship considering it would makes the site usable on all mobile browsers instead of the 30/40% that could handle the 60KB version. A side benefit is much faster page loads, a real issue on slow networks.

Stuff.tv is a gadget site covering electronic gizmos including mp3 players, video gear, mobile phones and in the latest edition Mecanno's wifi controled robot kit. There are also 40 video reviews which are in .3gp format and average a reasonable 220 kb in size.

19-Jul-2009 Stuff.tv appears to have killed off their mobile edition.  You can still read the site on Mowser using the link above

Tech news site specializing in location based services including; GPS, RFID, map mashups, PNDs and local search. Source Anything Geospatial

A tech gizmo blog that uses Mippin to create their mobile edition.

TechFlash, published by the Puget Sound Business Journal,  bills itself as "Seattle's Technology News Source" and covers the tech beat with special emphasis on Pacific Northwest companies. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

News, tips and "how to" site covering all types of digtal consomer electronics incuding PCs, notebooks, cameras, home media centers and software.

Ziff-Davis published online magazine with news and articles covering Visual Studio, Visual Basic, .Net. Source and other Microsoft development tools and technologies.

Not just PHP, links to 27 different online mobile tech magazines. Many don't seem to be actively updated but others like AJAX Magazine and Firefox Magazine are both fresh and informative.

Mini-Techmeme strives to find and link to the most relevant and authoritative versions of the top technology news, primarily from well known bloggers. Mini-Techmeme is the mobile optimized version of Techmeme. The stories that Mini-Techmeme links too are NOT mobilized. This works OK if you are using a full-web browser like Opera, Netfront or PIE and have an unlimited data plan. If the the large pages are a problem for your browser or your wallet you can always visit Techmeme via Skweezer or the Google Transcoder.

Engadget's HDTV news and review site. Like the other Weblogs, Inc mobile sites some images may be too large to for mobile browsers to load. See Engadget Mobile and More for details.

Personal blog of Mark Cuban, who made (and kept) billions in the internet boom and currently owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA team as well as several internet and entertainment companies. Mark blogs mostly about the internet business, future technologies and sports. Bl;og Maverick is always an original and interesting read.

Zune Thoughts covers news, views, rants and raves related to Microsoft's Zune music player.

General computer tech news site. Quite comprehensive but requires excessive scrolling on phones.

News site specializing in stories about new multimedia software and hardware. The mobile site itself is totally devoid of any sort of media other than text which keeps bandwith down.

DigiTimes is a daily print newspaper covering Taiwan's tech industry. DigiTimes has an English language web site with a PDA edition. The PDA site is text only and the page sizes are 10 KB and less making the site viewable on any phone.

A news site covering Microsoft Corporation. If there's news about and aspect of Microsoft's business or products, you will find it here

Computer software reviews and product announcements.

Mobile edition of a blog style news site covering  the web, advertising and technology in India. Pages may be too large (30-100 KB) to load on some feature phones.

Published by IDG, ITworld is a user driven community for IT professionals.  Registered users can post items and links, comment and "like" items on topics such as cloud computing, data recovery, security, disaster planning, open source and SaaS. The mobile edition is by mDog

A weekly print magazine targeted at IT managers, InfoWorld provides news and analysis of new technologies and trends from the world of  enterprise IT. The mobile edition offers text-only copies of hundred of articles from recent InfoWorld issues. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

CNET owned Silicon.com, a UK based news site targeted at corporate IT managers, now has a mobile edition. The announcement is here and Silicon.com is promoting its .mobi with a link and a banner ad on the PC site's front page. A word of warning though, the announcement says in a big bold green font that the mobile URL is www.silicon.mobi but that address just gives me a 404. The correct address is siliconuk.mobi which appears elsewhere on the page in a smaller font. You can also text silicon to 63320 to get the link pushed to your phone (I suspect this only works in the UK).

To be honest, I'd never heard of Silicon.com until I saw a mention of the new mobile site at mobility.mobi. I was pleasantly surprised, the mobile site is quite nicely done with about 40 stories divided into News and Commentary sections. The items contain the full text (but no images) of the same article on the PC site and everything is paginated to a maximum of 10 KB total page weight for fast loading and compatibility with even the most basic of mobile browsers. Usability is OK, with section "tab" links at the top of each page and inter-page navigation links and a search box at the bottom of the page. There are no accesskey accelerators, unfortunately. Something like 1 for next page, 2 for previous, 9 for Home does so much for efficient reading on a traditional mobile keypad, I really don't get why so few sites use them. For a good example of the use of accesskeys take a look a the mobile edition of The New York Times.

As for the content, Silicon.com seems a lot livelier than IT news stalwarts like Information Week, EWeek and InfoWorld. Articles are interesting well-written and in-depth. And there's a lot more coverage of mobile technology than on the other (US based) IT sites. I saw recent articles on Android and QR Codes on the PC Site. Strangely, if you search for "Android" or "QR Code" on the mobile site you won't find the articles. I don't know whether the site search is just wonky or if the mobile site ONLY includes the 40 items with no access to the archives.

Even if you are not an IT manager, I think you will find Silicon.com and, in spite of the limitations sliconuk.mobi, are good sources for general Tech News.

Mobile edition of CIO, a big controlled circulation (free to qualified subscribers) print magazine targeting Information Services managers.  The site carriers mobile formatted text-only versions of a subset of the magazine's high level articles on the latest tech trends with analysis of their impact on enterprise IS.

The mobile edition of CIO Insight, a controlled circulation print magazine for Information Technology executives. Content includes research reports, articles on best practices and industry news. Mobile conversion by mDog. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

 

IT News, Reviews and Analysis from a UK site owner by tech publisher Incisive Media. Well designed site with mobile friendly page and image sizes that works well on any phone.

News and reviews of the latest digital devices with a focus on mobile phones and laptop computers, game consoles and home theatre

Tech news with general, gamers and Apple sections.