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VH1 Mobile
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VH1 Front PageI've just added the international music oriented television station VH1's mobile site wap.vh1.com to the WapReview directory. VH1 Mobile is really loaded with content. It's a complete mobile entertainment site with news, gossip, photos, videos, contests  and polls.

The photo selection is particularly extensive with hundreds of photos organized into "FlipBooks" - slide shows based on a theme like "Reality Girls Gone Bad" or "Hottest Hunks Under 25".

VH1's video section contains around 20 free clips in low resolution, but compatible with almost any phone, 176x144 H.263 format. Depending on the handset each video is available as either a download, stream or both. The video's are a mix of entertainment news, music videos, star bios and trailers promoting VH1 shows.

Entertainment news and gossip is covered by a news section and several gossipy "blogs". There are also star and band bios, and contests on the site.

Although VH1 started as an MTV clone with music videos round the clock, the channel is better known today for its reality shows with celebrity casts like "Flavor of Love", where 20 women compete for the affections of rapper Flavor Flav.  VH1 mobile includes a mini Flavor of Love site with photos, contestant bios and polls.  There are similar mobile mini sites for two upcoming VH1 shows; game show series "I Love Money" and live concert show, "Remembering The Who".

The VH1 mobile site is uses color and images effectively to createthe feel of a modern full web site. It's a one size fits all design apparently targeted at higher end handsets with about 13KB of markup and a rather hefty 73KB worth of 300px wide images on the front page.  The site looks great in S60 WebKit and Opera Mini. Even the Openwave browser on a Motorola i855 managed to load the site completely if a little slowly but I'm sure there are a sizable number of mobile browsers that would run out of memory trying to load such a large site.  I'd like to see VH1 use browser detwection and image resizing to creat a site that works on all devices.

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