Wap Review

New Mobile Carnival at Indigo 102

Published

on February 8, 2010

. 0 Comments

There's another great Carnival of the Mobilists this week. It's hosted by Martin Wilson at Indigo 102. As always, it's a must read for everyone interested in any area of mobile.

The latest edition includes Tomi Ahonen's annual mobile industry statistics extravaganza plus a couple of items analyzing 2009 handset market share data. If stats aren't your thing there are a variety of thought provoking posts on other areas of the mobile world including a critical look at iPad, discussions of mobile marketing and advertising, Nokia's location strategy, Alcatel's cross platform developer APIs, the future of Windows Mobile and a detailed report from the M-Days conference in Munich.

Contratulations to Carl Redmon who took Post of the Week honors for his plea to the mobile industry to "Return to Basics". Further kudos to Emma Vernon whose "Gen Y Passes Over iPad, Looks Forward" was chosen Best post by a Carnival newcomer. And a big thank you to Martin for including my piece on what the N900 browser portends for the future of the mobile web.

Carnival of the Mobilists #210 is recommended reading for anyone who wants to broaden their mobile knowledge and keep up with the latest trends in the field.

Found On The Mobile Web – Winter Olympics Special Edition

Published

Dennis Bournique

on February 7, 2010

in Found on the Mobile Web

. 0 Comments

Vancouver 2010 Mobile

Amazing Super Bowl win by the underdog New Orleans Saints! But theres no time for sports fans to rest as the next big event on the sports calendar is the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, starting the Friday. This week's Found on the Mobile Web is an Olympics special bringing you the best mobile sites to follow all the games action.

Found on the Mobile Web is a weekly WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the YesWAP.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 2119 mobile sites.

All the Olympics sites listed below can also be found in the Sports/Winter Olympics section of the directory and portal for easy access with your mobile phone.

NBC Olympics Mobile

Vancouver2010 vancouver2010.com/mobile/ The official mobile site of the 2010 Winter Olympics has ticket information, live results, medals, schedules, athlete bios, teams, news and photos. The news section uses a feed from the AFP news agency. The feed items are nicely formatted for mobile and are full items not excerpts. The sheer quantity of news in amazing and a bit overwhelming. The games haven't even started yet and the site already has 65 pages containing over 900 articles in its news section! Unfortunately there is no way to search the news. At 80 KB this works best with smartphones and maybe too large for the embedded browsers of some feature phones..

BBC Olympics Mobile

Vancouver2010 also offers a free iPhone app featuring a location-aware spectator guide, maps to all the venues and real time results.
Content Usability

NBC Olympics m.nbcolympics.com NBC seems to have one of the biggest and most feature rich Winter Olympics sites. It has news, photos, videos, live results, schedules, medal counts, athlete profiles, video, polls, trivia, TV and online programming grids and Vancouver information. You can sign up on the site to receive a variety of free Email and SMS alerts (US Only) and to customize the mobile site content to emphasize your favorite sport.

ESPN Mobile - Olympics 2010

NBC also promises free iPhone and BlakcBerry apps that are "coming soon". With the games five days away lets hope that's real soon!

There are about six stories covering today's events plus athlete interviews and prognostication on the likely outcome of upcoming events. The stories are quite in depth for a mobile site. Not surprisingly, coverage emphasizes US athletes.

The site works best on smartphones. It looks great and is easy to navigate on my Android phone, Nokia N95 and using Opera Mini. NBC and their mobile design partner, Starcut Media, made some effort at adapting content to a variety of handsets by varying image and video size and quality but the homepage weighs in at 64 KB, still too large for the embedded browsers of many feature phones.
Content Usability

The Score Mobile - Olympics 2010

BBC Sports news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/mobile/olympic_games/vancouver_2010 generally has excellent Olympics coverage and I expect this year to be no different.. The site offers news, results, photos and Olympic quizzes. At this point there are only a handful of news items on the site but this will surely change once the games get started.

The BBC also has some free Olympics mobile wallpapers for download in various sizes.

Typical of BBC Mobile, page and image sizes are small enough to work with virtually any mobile browser. There's even a version of the site for old WML-only phones.
Content Usability

The Guardian - Olympics 2010

ESPN m.espn.go.com dominates TV, online and mobile sports coverage especially with US audiences. The dedicated ESPN Olympics 2010 page has comprehensive coverage with in-depth, sport by sport analysis, news headlines, polls, trivia and extensive background features covering Olympics history and page for each Olympic sport with the event's history, rules, 2010 schedules and top competitors.

ESPN does extensive content adaptation to make the site is usable even on five year old feature phones. Newer phones and better browsers get more and larger images and ESPN automatically delivers a slick, touch version of the site to Android and WebOS devices and the iPhone.
Content Usability New York Times Mobile - Olympics 2010

The Score m.thescore.com/olym Canadian cable TV sports channel, The Score's mobile site has an unusual design with an auto-refreshing front page that displays the latest live scores for a specific sport. For the Olympics, The Score has built a page dedicated to Canada's nation sport, hockey. It will provide full, in-game coverage of men’s and women’s hockey along with medal standings, hockey tournament standings, men’s hockey stat leaders, and news updates from all Olympic events.
Content Usability

The Guardian m.guardian.co.uk Big UK newspape The Guardian - Olympics 2010 r and major online news outlet The Guardian has a hit on it's hands with its $3.99 iPhone app which has been widely praised for its usability and overall quality. I don't have an iPhone but The Guardian's recently revamped mobile web site is pretty slick too. The site (and I presume the app too) has a dedicated Olympics page with 20 well written news items with photos.
Content Usability

The New York Times mobile.nytimes.com is the premiere US newspaper and one of the best of the old media at adapting to the online world, including the mobile web. The "Gray Lady" can always be counted on to deliver timely and comprehensive cover of the news, including sports. In advance of the games, the paper's mobile site has a large collection of current and archived Olympic 2010 news items and background pieces. I expect the New York Times will provide some of the best and most balanced Olympics coverage on the mobile web.
CContent Usability

Sports Illustrated Mobile - Olympics 2010

The Vancouver Sun www.vancouversun.com/mobile/ The Winter Olympics' hometown has two daily newspapers, The Sun and The Province which are under common ownership. Both papers have mobile sites with virtually identical coverage including a dedicated Winter Olympics page with over a dozen news stories with photos. With lots of reporters and photographers on the scene and local expertise, I expect The Sun and The Province to have outstanding Olympics coverage with an emphasis on the local angle including features on local Olympic athletes, tips on finding tickets and the impact of the games on residents and local businesses. The two paper's sites are very similar. Both are rather slow loading, but the Sun's seems a little faster.
Content Usability

Washington Post - Olympics 2010

Sports Illustrated m.si.com has one of the more interesting mobile Olympics sites with loads of original, in-depth articles from the magazine's stable of award winning sportswriters along with news, results, photos and the latest medal count.

SI and their mobile publishing partner, Crisp Wirelsss have done a good job aof adapting the site's content all all devices with, WML, XHTML and Touch versions of the site.
Content Usability

The Washington Post mobile.washingtonpost.com The Washington Post has good mobile Olympics 2010 page that promises to deliver the latest news, scores, features and photos from the games.
Content Usability

The N900 Forecasts Mobile Browsing’s Future

Published

Dennis Bournique

on February 5, 2010

in Browsers

. 6 Comments

Using the N900's MicroB browser is really an eye opener. The combination of a relatively large screen, 800x480 px resolution, very good JavaScript performance and full desktop Flash is turning my my mobile browsing pattern upside down. When I use Opera Mini on an N95 or the Android browser on the HTC Magic, I typically spend 75% of my time on mobile sites and the rest on "full" web sites. With the N900 it's more like 50/50 and the percentage of desktop sites is rising as I find more and more that deliver deliver a richer browsing experience on the N900 than their mobile equivalents. The screenshots are a representative sampling of how desktop sites look on the N900. Click the thumbnails for to see the images in their original 800x480 glory.

The N900 reinforces something that I've long believed would eventually happen, the merger of the mobile and desktop webs. This doesn't mean that users will simply switch from using mobile sites to desktop ones on their phones. Rather it marks a fundamental difference in the way that we look at the web and mobile devices. Going forward, web designers, developers and publishers will need to take into account that a rapidly growing percentage of their users will be visiting their "desktop" sites with phone browsers.

It's not just a matter of tweaking the CSS and layout of desktop pages to ensure that they render attractively and are usable on mobile devices. Having a significant percentage of mobile visitors means taking into account the different needs of mobile visitors and their device's extra capabilities. As Tomi Ahonen has been pointing out for years, mobile phones are actually more rather than less capable and powerful than PCs. Tomi has identified 10 "C"s (capabilities) of mobile phones, several of which are especially relevant to the web sites and web services. What Tomi calls Context (where, when and what) Charging (seamless payment), Community (social networking) and Creation (citizen journalism, micro blogging, photo and video sharing) are four that stand out. As mobile users flock to desktop sites, publishers and designers need to enable these special mobile capabilities to the highest degree possible. For example:

The desktop sites of bus, train or rapid transit services must take into account the time of day and the user's location when providing route and schedule information.
Local shopping and services search engines should emphasize what's near me and open for business now.
eCommerce sites and payment processors need to exploit the phone as a payment device. It shouldn't be necessary to key in 10 different bits of credit card information in order to buy something using your phone.
Social networking sites have to ensure that all their services, especially text, photo, video sharing, are available and usable when mobile.
News gathering organizations have a huge opportunity to effectively use the mobile citizen journalists' ability to be on the scene of a breaking story with commentary, photos, videos and audio.

Does all this mean that the mobile web as we know it is going away? Yes, eventually I believe it will. But that time is several years away. The N900 is a harbinger of the future. It alone of the phones I've used delivers a near desktop browsing experience. Others come close like the the Nexus One and Droid/Milestone. They match the N900 in screen size and resolution but not JavaScript or Flash performance. The iPhone with its lower resolution screen and lack of Flash is not even in the same class.

At the moment the N900 is a bit of a niche device. It represents the next generation of mobile browsing but has minuscule market share. For the foreseeable future the vast majority of web access will be with less powerful devices. This is true in the developed world and especially in the developing one where slow, expensive data and a preponderance of low-end and very old handsets mean a continuing need for lightweight web sites. I believe that traditional mobile web traffic will continue to grow for a long time thanks to a sort of trickle down effect that will occur as high end devices make mobile browsing acceptable and fashionable combined with the trend to include unlimited data with the cheap unlimited voice, text and data plans that US prepaid providers like Straight Talk and Boost Mobile are offering feature phone users.

If anything the rise of phones that can browse like PCs means more rather than less work for publishers and designers. Not only do they have to build, enhance and maintain traditional mobile sites to exploit growing mobile traffic but they have to work to ensure that their desktop sites meet the needs of advanced users. No matter how you look at it the web is going mobile.

Mobile Bookmarklets for Webmasters

Published

Dennis Bournique

on February 3, 2010

in Browsers and Uncategorized

. 0 Comments

Popurius

WapReview reader and fellow blogger Selurus recently discovered that the Page Rank Checker bookmarklet on my Opera Mini Bookmarklets page at o.yeswap.com wasn't working anymore.

He suggested replacing it with a bookmarket he had made for popuri.us, a new service that shows not only a site's Page Rank but also its Alexa Rank, Complete Rank, number of Yahoo and Live Search Backlinks, and Bloglines Subscribers. (It also supposed to show Quancast Rank, Google Backlinks, Technorati Links and Delicious Bookmarks, but those four metrics always seem to come up as "N/A").

So I removed the broken Page Rank bookmarklet from the Opera Mini Bookmarklets page andadded the Popurius one. While I was at it I added several other bookmarklets for all of you who obsess over their site's traffic and search engine optimization. All of these pass the current page's URL to services that return information about the site. They can be found in the "Page Info" section at o.yeswap.com.

Which Server

Popurius (javascript:location.href='http://popuri.us/?u='+location.href) - shows Alexa Rank, Complete Rank, Yahoo Backlinks, Live Search Backlinks, and Bloglines Subscribers.

Which Server (javascript:location.href='http://www.dojo.ie/cgi-bin/server.cgi?'+location.hostname) - Reveals the Web Server (Apache, IIS, etc.) that's powering the page. (The results page is WML so it won't work with the iPhone or most desktop browsers.)

Dataopedia (javascript:location.href='http://dataopedia.com/'+location.hostname) - shows detailed data ,with charts and graphs, from Alexa, Quantcast, Compete, Google, Digg, Delicious, registrar records and other sources (Dataopedia Review).

To add one of the above bookmarklets to your browser:

Dataopedia

If you are using desktop Firefox, Chrome or IE, just drag any of the three links above to your toobar.

If you are using a browser that supports copying copying text from a web page like Opera desktop, the iPhone or the N900's MicroB; copy the parenthesized text shown next to the links above into a new bookmark.

For Opera Mini 5, 4.2 and 3.1, Opera Mobile 10, Palm Blazer, the Nokia S60 V5 browser, Mobile IE and possibly other mobile browsers; visit o.yeswap.com and click the bookmarklet you want to add. When the page reloads, bookmark it. Then edit the bookmark address by removing "http://o.yeswap.com/?" from the beginning.