WapReview

NBC seems to have the biggest and most feature rich Winter Olympics site. It has news, photos, videos, live results, schedules, medal counts, athlete profiles, video, polls, trivia, TV and online programming grids and Vancouver information.  You can sign up on the site to receive a variety of free Email and SMS alerts (US Only) and to customize the mobile site content to emphasize your favorite sport.

NBC also promises free iPhone and BlackBerry apps that are "coming soon". With the games five days away lets hope that's real soon!

There are about six stories covering today's events plus athlete interviews and prognostication on the likely outcome of upcoming events. The stories are quite in depth for a mobile site. Not surprisingly, coverage emphasizes US athletes.

The site works best on smartphones. It looks great and is easy to navigate on my Android phone,  Nokia N95 and using Opera Mini.  NBC and their mobile design partner, Starcut Media, made some effort at adapting content to a variety of handsets by varying image and video size and quality but the homepage weighs in at 64 KB, too large for the embedded browsers of many feature phones.

The official mobile site of the 2010 Winter Olympics has  ticket information, live results, medals, schedules, athlete bios, teams, news and photos. The news section uses a feed from the AFP news agency. The feed items are nicely formatted for mobile and are full items not excerpts.  The sheer quantity of news in amazing and a bit overwhelming. The games haven't even started yet and the site already has 65 pages containing over 900 articles in its news section! Unfortunately there is no way to search the news. At 80 KB this this another smartphone optimized site.

Vancouver2010 also offers a free iPhone app featuring a location-aware spectator guide, maps to all the venues and real time results.

BBC Sports generally provides excellent Olympics coverage and I expect this year to be no different.. The site offers news, results, photos and Olympic quizes. At this point there are only a handful of news items on the site but this will surely change once the games get started.  

The BBC also has some free Olympics mobile wallpapers for download in various sizes. 

Typical of BBC Mobile, page and image sizes are small enough  to work with virtually any mobile browser.  There's even a version of the site for old WML-only phones.

ESPN dominates TV, online and mobile sports coverage especially with US audiences. The dedicated ESPN Olympics 2010 page has comprehensive coverage with in-depth, sport by sport analysis, news headlines, polls, trivia and extensive background features covering Olympics history and page for each Olympic sport with the event's history, rules, 2010 schedules and top competitors.

ESPN does extensive content adaptation to make the site is usable even on five year old feature phones.  Newer phones and better browsers get more and larger images and ESPN automatically delivers a slick, touch version of the site to Android and WebOS devices and the iPhone.

The Times is the premiere US news paper and one of the best of the old media at adapting to the online world, including the mobile web. The "Gray Lady" can always be counted on to deliver timely and comprehensive cover of the news, including sports. In advance of the games, the  paper's mobile site has a large collection of current and archived Olympic 2010 news items and background pieces. I expect the New York Times will provide some of the best and most balanced Olympics coverage on the mobile web.

The Winter Olympics's hometown has two daily newspapers, The Vancouver Sun and The Province under common ownership,  Both papers have mobile sites with virtually identical coverage including  a dedicated Winter Olympics page with over a dozen news stories with photos. With lots of reporters and photographers and local expertise, I expect The Sun and The Province to have outstanding Olympics coverage with an emphasis on the local angle like features on local Olympic athletes, tips on finding tickets and the impact of the games on residents and local businesses. The two paper's sites are virtually identical. Both are rather slow loading, but the Sun's seems a little faster.