Author Archives: Dennis Bournique

wcities.com

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A nice WAP2 guide for travelers. Wcities covers cities on all continents with listings of restaurants, lodging, bars, public transportation (bus, train, taxi) current weather and sights to see. Coverage of the United States is particularly extensive with 94 cities covered including relatively small places like Buffalo, Branson, MO and Sacramento. The listings of individual establishments are quite detailed with current prices and a brief description. The descriptions read more like something written the venue’s marketing person than an impartial … Continue reading →

AOL Mobile Search

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In my last entry, I hinted that there is an another mobile search site that did an even better job of making “real” web sites usable on WAP browsers. That site is AOL’s mobile search portal. You use it just like Google’s mobile search and like desktop search engines by entering your search terms and then picking a site to browse from a list of sites that match your query. Like Goggle, but unlike all the other mobile search/transcoding sites … Continue reading →

Google Mobile Search

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The Google Mobile site has been upgraded. Specifically the Web search for WAP2 phones. This lets you do a search of the web for regular desktop websites (there is also a Mobile Web search for finding WAP sites – which hasn’t been updated and works very well). The Web search function has been around for a while and has always allowed you to browse the sites it finds. What’s changed is that before the version of the web site sent … Continue reading →

Gecko Beach Forums

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I’ve made an addition to the Reviews section of this site. It’s a fairly new online forum for cellular enthusiasts, GeckoBeach. This is the eleventh mobile cell phone forum listed on the/Home/Technology/Mobile Phones/Forums page. GeckoBeach is a Canadian based site and has an emphasis on Canadian providers. There is plenty of interest to non-Canadians on the site including phone reviews and experiences of travelers roaming or using local pre-paid sims around the world. The site is quite active, although nowhere … Continue reading →

Bay Area Rapid Transit

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Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is rail transit system in the San Francisco CA (USA) Bay Area. BART recently introduced a wireless version of their online trip planner. Transit schedules and trip planners – like driving directions and city directories are ideal mobile applications. I think it would be absolutely wonderful if I could bring up a tool on my phone that would let me find the best way to get somewhere on transit particullarly in a city I wasn’t … Continue reading →

FAST MSearch

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FAST MSearch is a WAP search engine that is not usually available on a public url. FAST prefers to sell their search technology to mobile carriers (I’m not sure which carriers). It is a shame that FAST is not more widely available as it is THE best WAP search engine I have seen. It seems to have a database of WAP sites that is more complete than even Google’s and doesn’t return the duplicate hits that plague Google’s mobile search. … Continue reading →

International Herald Tribune

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The International Herald Tribune is a 117-year old Paris based English language daily newspaper. Owned by The New York Times, the paper is targeted at expatriates and travelers. The IHT has both WAP1 and WAP2 mobile sites. Both contain the full text of dozens of articles from the paper’s web site. The WAP2 version has about twice as may stories as the WAP1 version and also has small photos at the top of most stories. While the sites aren’t flashy, … Continue reading →

Opera Mini

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I’ve been playing around with Opera Mini. If you haven’t heard yet, Opera Software ASA has released a Java ME (J2ME) version of their browser called Opera-Mini. Opera is the Norwegian company who make the browser of the same name for many platforms. All their browsers have a technology they call small screen rendering™ which reformats full desktop web pages for display on tiny phone screens. The reformatting works remarkably well – although reformatted pages aren’t likely to be as … Continue reading →