Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this 4 part post covered four mobile transcoding sites. Back in part 1, I defined mobile transcoding as “an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device.” In this, the final installment, I look at one more transcoding engine, AOL and try to summarize what I’ve … Continue reading
Revised 14-Oct-2006 to reflect improvements in both these transcoders. Skweezer has resolved it’s formatting and performance issues and now resizes images. Google has also added image resizing. I now consider these two transcoders esentially equal and the best currently available. Parts 1 and 2 of this 4 part post covered four mobile transcoding sites, WAP sites which reformat desktop web content to make it more usable on the small screen browsers of phones and PDAs. This entry looks at two … Continue reading
Part 1 of this series of posts covered two mobile transcoding sites, loband and Phonifier. In part two we will look at two more, IYHY and MobileLeap. In case you missed Part 1, I define a mobile transcoding as “an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device.” IYHY IYHY is another … Continue reading
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Mobile Transcoding which I define as an application (usually a web service) which when given a request for any web page, does some sort of on-the-fly edit of the page to make it usable on the small screen of the a mobile device. The promise of transcoding is that it will allow any web site to be viewed on any handheld device. I really don’t think a machine translation of a site … Continue reading
A while back I posted about hotel search and booking sites and why I think they are a natural for WAP. It seems that Hotels.com agrees as they have launched a WAP site which comes in both WAP1 (wml) and WAP2 (xhtml) versions. The UI is well optimized for mobile devices in some areas but breaks down badly in several critical areas. As you can see in the first image, numeric accelerators are used and there are a number of … Continue reading
Entertainment gossip and news is what E! Entertainment Television is all about. The popular daily TV show has a website, of course, and now they have a WAP2 site as well. You can follow the “news” about your favorite celebrities and stars on your mobile phone. There are around 30 stories on the site at any given time divided into categories of Latest News, Celebrity News, Movie News, TV News and Music News. The stories consist of a picture and … Continue reading
This is interesting if not all that useful. Cingular, the largest US mobile carrier, allows non-subscribers to connect to their WAP portal which they call MediaNet. The url is http://kevxml2a.infospace.com/cinglr.wap/wml11/index.wml Although the .wml extension usually means a WAP1 site, Cingular uses browser sniffing to send either WAP1 or WAP2 content depending on the capabilities of your phone’s browser. If you don’t want to key that long url into your phone, you can find it linked on my WAP portal site … Continue reading
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