Usability 
IFinally the San Francisco Chronicle has a proper mobile edition. It's at mobile.sfgate.com. SFGate.com also redirects mobile browsers to the mobile version. Fear not full-web browser users, you can still get to the full version, if you want. Just click the link at the bottom of the mobile page labeled "Standard". This is something that every site that redirects from their main URL to a mobile variant should be doing. but which most are not. Not every mobile user wants the mobile editon, especially if it's a subset.
Mobile.SFGate.com is a subset but a pretty good one. Today it includes the full text of 18 top news stories and between 5 and 31 items each in the Weird News, Local, Sports, Entertainment, Food & Wine, Business and Technology, Gossip, Home & Garden and Travel sections. Fourteen of the paper's columnists and the same number of its blogs are in today's mobile edition. I didn't see Willie Brown's column but it's only published on Sunday. Maybe Willie will appear on his publication date. There are Classified ads but they are strangely limited to just Autos and Real Estate. This seems like a missed bet , where are popular categories like garage sales (a must for mobile), pets and Jobs? Content is rounded out with horoscopes and an Op-Ed page. There are no photos though. I think that news sites really need to include some news photos. Of course they need to limited in size and weight to what the browser can handle. Speaking of which, the only image on the site is the paper's logo which at 215px wide is too wide for many phone browsers.
SFGate now offers text alerts for breaking news too. You can sign up at sfgate.com/mobile.
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