Yahoo quietly released a major upgrade to their mobile web based search product last month. I’m surprised that there wasn’t more buzz on this as I think it’s a pretty big deal. I can’t find an official Yahoo announcement and only one blogger, a Yahoo employee, seems to have written anything about it. So what’s new? The big change is that when you do a Web search, Yahoo now includes mobile sites in the results – Yahoo used to only … Continue reading
The 45th weekly Carnival of the Mobilists is being held at MobileCrunch. Host Oliver Starr has done a superb job of collecting and organizing the past week’s best posts on mobile topics. Thank you Oliver, for including my Live Mobile post! Consider participating in the next Carnival. Everything you need to know to get started can be found at the Carnival of the Mobilists site, mobili.st.
Kayak.com is a relatively new travel meta-search engine which searches over 120 travel sites including all the major airline sites except Southwest, many hotel chain sites as well as travel booking sites like Orbitz and CheapTickets. It includes a lot of sites you might not think of searching like AsiaRooms.com or Wegolo.com which specializes in European budget airlines. Kayak is purely a search engine like Google – it doesn’t do bookings. You search for the lowest fare or for a … Continue reading
Hot on the heels of Yahoo’s recent mobile home page redesign comes a major upgrade to Microsoft’s mobile deck. There is a new mobile.live.com URL (the old mobile.msn.com address also points to the new content). If you want to preview the site in your PC browser use mobile.live.com/wml/ as the above URL’s will take you to a page about Live Mobile. The new front page has a brighter, less cluttered look with updated icons. This is not just a cosmetic … Continue reading
This week the Carnival is hosted at mobile developer David Beer’s Software Everywhere. It’s a great collection of the past week or so’s best items on mobile subjects from around the blogosphere. Thank you David, for including one of my posts. Congratulations to Michael Mace whose post on European vs. US mobile phone use was chosen as Post of the Week.
Announcing WAP Review Mobile! I’ve launched a new mobile version of this blog featuring almost everything on the full site in a format that I hope will work on even the most brain dead of WAP2 phones. It’s based on Alex King’s wp-mobile WordPress plugin which I’ve tweaked a little to suit my tastes. There is browser detection so if you hit wapreview.com/blog with a mobile device you should automatically get the mobile version. As a side benefit if you … Continue reading
Yahoo has updated their mobile homepage ( wap.oa.yahoo.com ). Compare the new (top) and the old (bottom). I do think the new layout is more attractive. But where have the accesskeys gone!!! What’s an accesskey? It’s a shortcut key that can be added to various web page elements, like links. When you press the shortcut key, the link is followed even if it’s scrolled off the screen. On most phones, which don’t have a tocuchsceen or mouse, accesskeys greatly speed … Continue reading
Simple Machine Forums (SMF) is free server software for hosting a user forum. The reason why I’m writing about SMF on Wap Review is that every SMF forum by default, is a mobile site. This a great feature and I think as the mobile web continues to grow in popularity more and more server packages will offer this sort of built in mobile version. I first saw this trend with Microsoft’s Live Spaces (review) blog platform and now there’s SMF. … Continue reading