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Wimbledon Mobile

The Championships at Wimbledon, the world's premiere tennis event is held every year in late june. For 2009, the Wimbledon organizers, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, have commissioned IBM to create a mobile web site and iPhone and Android apps for the event.

Wimbledon.org claims that you can point your mobile browser at m.wimbledon.org for the mobile site.Unfortunately, m.wimbledon.org redirects to the wimbledon.org desktop page on aseveral browsers including the Android browser and Opera Mini

m.wimbledon.org does work as advertised on my BlackBerry and N95 so it looks like overly aggressive browser detection is to blame for the failure on the Ion. This sort of thing is really common and also really dumb. A given URL, usually a *.mobi or m.* is billed as delivering mobile formatted content, yet for some users it redirects to a desktop version. I'm sure the designers have the best of intentions but it doesn't work. If I wanted the desktop site I wouldn't have bothered to type M.wimbledon.org now would I?

I did find a workaround to the redirection problem. m.wimbledon.org/mobile/ (the trailing slash is required) will get you the mobile site in any browser. The mobile web version is actually quite nice with news, interviews, live scores, results and a complete calendar of matches for the entire tournament. It works great in Opera mini and the Android browser although I'm concerned that the pages sizes of up to 48 KB maybe a bit large for some feature phone's embedded browsers.

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