What's This?

mobileleap

Content: ***  Usability: XXX
mlvb.net/ (xhtml-mp)

Mobileleap is a commercial site which is "currently free for personal, non-commercial use." It resizes images (to 224px wide, better suited to pda's than phones) but doesn't doesn't break large pages into multiple smaller ones. On the SE and Nokia emulators Mobileleap refused to work, telling me to "enable cookies" although both browsers do support cookies and cookie support was enabled. The Openwave emulator was able to load part of this blog before throwing a page too large error. I was unable to load the Southwest site with Phonifier on any browser (even Firefox), consistently getting a timeout error.

Mobileleap has an extensive settings dialog which allows you configure such things as image quality or turn off images entirely, specify the screen size of the mobile (which seems to have no effect on the transcoded output). Their is an option to replace "large images" with links which doesn't seem to work (or mobileleap doesn't consider a 640 px image "large"). Another option uses CSS styles which enables some background and text colors on most sites but seems buggy as some colors are wrong and block elements appear in the wrong place - often on top of other content obscuring it. If you register, mobileleap will remember your preferred settings, let you save bookmarks and give you a history dialog where you can revisit sites you browsed in the current or previous sessions.

Mobileleap is a mobile RSS reader as well. It works just like Phonifier and has the same disadvantage for use on a phone. The index page which for mobile use should just list the title of each entry but also includes first 200 characters of the entry body which means you have to do too much scrolling to reach the last entry. I found mobileleap fast and reliable however consider the following statement in MobileLeap's FAQ:

"For security reasons, only a limited number of non-registered (anonymous user) requests are allowed per session and per day. Furthermore, to ensure that the demonstration server resources are distributed appropriately, under times of heavy server load users will be capped to a limited number of page requests, with preference given to registered, confirmed users. If you are interested in an unrestricted transcoding account, please contact us."

Mobileleap shows promise, it is a beta after all. They do resize images and they allow you to specify your browser screen dimensions which suggests that they are planing to resize images to fit those dimensions. Hopefully, mobileleap will remain free and unrestricted and will continue to improve.


Screenshots:

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What's This?
QR Code
It's a QR (Quick Response) Code containing the URL of WapReview Mobile. Snap it with your phone's QR Code reader to go to the WapReview mobile site.

Ratings Key :

Content - 0-5 *'s indicating the quality of the site's writing, depth, timeliness and accuracy.

Usability - 0-5 X's indicating the usability of the site on a mobile device, based on ease and intuitivness of navigation and lack of excessive scrolling through ads etc. to reach main content.