WapReview

The BBC has some of the best news services on the web and virtually all that content is available in full on the mobile site. Users can customize the site, adding, deleting and rearranging  the content on the home page and can specify their location for weather reports

The BBC's new site for mobile devices. Built using mobile first responsive design techniques it's designed to adapt to a range of devices from feature phones with 240px wide screens and no JavaScript support up to seven inch tablets with 720x1280 px screens. If your are interested in the details, the BBC designers have shared their design goals and methodology and their testing methods in a couple of interesting blog posts. Via Stephanie Rieger

Listen live to all the BBC's radio broadcast services with the Beeb's just launched BBC Radio mobile site.  The streaming audio feeds are optimized to work on virtually all mobile devices that support streaming with the exception of the iPhone which will be supported soon. Source: BBC Internet Blog

Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the UK's Guardian.

Mobile edition of The Independent, a U.K. national daily newspaper.  The site carries the full text and a few photos from  close to 100 articles from the paper's News, Opinion, Sports, Travel, Money and Entertainment sections. Source: @microflash

Mobile edition of the UK's venerable (founded 1785) The Times. The thoroughly modern mobile site feature articles from the paper's News, Business, Sport, Tech & Web, Entertainment, Weather, Markets and Jobs sections. This week The Times launched a new feature, the Going Out Guide a location based directory of nearby events, movies and watering holes.Source: GoMo News

UK tabloid, The Sun is largest paper in the UK and has the highest circulation of any English language paper in the world.  thesun.mobi carries the full text and a photo from about a dozen stories each from the paper's News, Sport, Woman, Gizmo (technology), Showbiz, TV and Mystic Meg (horoscopes) sections. Source: Mobility.mobi

The Daily Telegraph is the UK's largest newspaper in terms of circulation, The paper was also one of the first to adopt digital distribution, launching its first web site in 1994. There mobile site has been around almost as long. The current mobile version includes all the editorial content of the desktop web edition in an easy to use format.

Up to the minute UK politics news, features, view and analysis, plus guides, briefings and debate from a leading UK political news site. Source: Mobile Entertainment News

National and World News, Sports, Entertainment and "Strange but True" reports from the mobile website of the UK's Sky satellite television service.

Metro a free print newspaper distributed on public transit systems in the UK.  In the nine years since its launch, Metro has become the fourth largest paper in the country with over a million daily readers.  Metro is also on the web at metro.co.uk and on the mobile web at metro.mobi .

The most interesting thing about Metro is its video section, MEviews . The video content costs 50p a clip to download and it's all user generated. While this sounds like a bit of a rip-off, especially given that the same videos are available on the full-web Metro site for free, it's not as bad as it sounds. Metro is sharing some of  that revenue with content creators.  If you upload a video to Metro, you  get 15p every time its viewed on a mobile.  The idea is not actually new, mobile network 3 did something very similar in 2005 with its See Me TV which eventually turned into EyeVibe and is now available on both 3 and O2.  EyeVibe's videos are cheaper to download at 10p each, but only share a meager 1p per download with the creator.  I wonder if EyeVibe uploders are switching to MEview for the higher payout?

The user generated content and  revenue sharing aspect of Metro is probably the most interesting thing about the site, but Metro.mobi is also a pretty good general news site.  It's  quite well designed and makes extensive use of adaptation, varying page and image sizes and markup language, to deliver an optimal experience to any phone  from ancient wml-only devices to the iPhone.  Content is strong on sports and celebrity gosip but there is  hard news as well. Metro carries about 50 full-length news articles on the site at any given time, most include photos.

The UK tabloid The Daily Mirror's mobile site has been completely redesigned. The new design keeps some of the original's visual appeal thanks to the use of lots of color. Content hasn't changed much, a smattering of hard news along with lots of sports, entertainment and "lifestyle" pieces on dieting, beauty, style, health and relationships.

I wish the the developers had been a little more carefully about keeping page size down. Although the Mirror varies image sizes in an effort to reduce page size for phone's that can't handle large pages it's not enough. Phones like the Motorola RAZR V3 and L7, which can't handle more than 20 KB, get a page with 34 links, 13 images and a 44 KB file size, too large to load on these phones. This is reflected in the site's Ready.mobi ratings. On the five point Ready.mobi scale, The Daily Mirror earned a Three (Fair "...will possibly display poorly on a mobile phone.")

NewsNow (nnmob.com) which claims to be "The UK's #1 News Portal" is a River of News style aggregator which is updated every five minutes with news headlines from hundreds of online sources around the world. The mobile page includes just the headline which link to the original (generally non-mobile) source site. NewsNow recommends using Opera Mini to view the site, if you visit with any other mobile browser you land on a splash page with an Opera Mini download link. The splash page also has the option to: "...try NewsNow Mobile with your device's built-in browser (not recommended)"

Mobile news site targeted at South Asians living in the UK. Sections include world and UK news, sports, business and entertainment with a focus on Bollywood. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

The Manchester Evening News is a daily newspaper covering the Greater Manchester metropolitan area in North West England.  The paper's profusely illustrated online mobile edition emphasizes local news on the front page. A top navigation menu linking to Business, Politics, Crime, Transport, Health, and  Education sections. There are also links to non-mobile versions of the local weather forecast and the paper's searchable archive.

The site's mobile browser detection is broken. The mobile site is only served to iPhone and Andriud browsers. Other mobile browsers get the desktop version!

Chard and Ilminster News - local news, sport, jobs,  live traffic & weather for Chard and Ilminster and Crewkerne in the South Somerset region of South West England. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile edition of a weekly newspaper for England's Lake District, Kendal and  Cumbria. Coverage includes news, sport, tourist guides, weather, walks, motoring along with property and employment listings. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

The latest local news, sport, events, weather and travel information for Somerset, Devon and Cornwall from a group of regional newspapers in South West England. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

The Herald is a daily newspaper serving Oxfordshire, Abingdon, Didcot, Wantage, and Wallingford in South East England. The paper's mobile site has local news, sports, traffic, weather and jobs listings. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory.

News, sports, weather and job listings from The Dudley News, a daily newspaper published in Dudley, West Midlands, UK.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

The latest news, sports, traffic, business, weather and job listings from Newport, Chepstow. Pontyport, Gwent and the rest of South Wales. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Local news, sports, entertainment, weather and travel advisories from Bournemouth (UK) Daily Echo which also covers Poole Christchurch, Dorset and Hampshire. This is a good example of a local news site with hundreds of full length stories most illustrated with a photo.

Latest news, sports, weather and event calendar for Teesside, Middlesbrough and the Tees Valley in the UK from The Middlesbrough Evening Gazette. Sorts coverage includes live football match updates and a section devoted to news of the local heroes, Boro FC. The homepage can be customized to show your favorite sections. source: Oh! Mobile Directory

News in in English from YLE, the Finish public broadcating service test and images from about 50 top stories.  Source: Juni's Pocket IE Startpage

Mobile web edition of France's government funded intertional news broadcasting service.  Published in French, english and Arabic it covers french and international news with dedicated sections for sports, tech, culture, business and  middle eastern and african news.  A unique feature is a real time feed of wire service stories.

The English mobile edition of Der Spiegel's web site Spiegel is the Germany's biggest weekly newsmagazine. It's a good general mobile news site with the full text of about a hundred recent articles from the magazine's PC website. A few articles are illustrated with a single well chosen photo. At 191 px the photos are little too wide for mainstream phones but the site is still usable most devices.

Published by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, euro|topics aggregates news, politics and cultural discussions  from over 150 newspapers. published in 28 European nations. The mobile site is available in German, English, French and Spanish.

Deutsche Welle or 'DW' is Germany's independent but publicly funded international broadcaster. Somewhat similar to the BBC International Service or the Voice of America, DW broadcasts shortwave radio news, sports and cultural content in 29 languages and satellite TV in four; English, German, Spanish and Arabic. Like the BBC, DW has a comprehensive internet site, DW-WORLD.DE again in 29 languages. Of course I wouldn't be writing abour DW-WORLD unless they had an interesting mobile web site. The mobile site is mobile.dw-world.de and it features almost all of the content from the full web site in different 29 language editions .
The mobile site not only contains most of the articles on the full web site but the articles are also complete, although that's not too hard as DW-WORLD articles tend to be short, averaging 400 words. Most articles are illustrated with a single photo 122px wide. Page weight is mobile friendly, about 7 KB for text and image combined. The UI is reasonably good with a text based navigation menu at the top of the main pages, followed by short headlines linking to the stories. There is some room for improvement, the navigation menu has too many links and fills the first screen and half of the second on a 128x160px device. I'd also like to see access keys on the navigation links and the "To Top" link at the bottom of the page, but it's a very usable design as it stands.

Typically Spanish - The latest news from Spain. National, regional and Business stories arranged by tag.

20-Mar-2013: Site displays an "Under Construction" page.

I like to read the news from a variety of sources from around the world. There's a lot going on that you'll never hear about if you rely on the limited, superficial international news coverage provided by the US news media. I'm sure the media in every country has a local bias as well. To really have an international perspective on current events, you need to follow a variety of sources worldwide. Fortunately the Internet, including the mobile Internet, makes that easy. I've collected links to a number of mobile news sources from around the world in the Wap Review Directory and on my companion WAP site YesWap.com.

One of my favorite international news web sites EuroNews has recently redesigned their mobile site. EuroNews Mobile has an attractive page design that is also easy to navigate. Stories are exactly the same in terms of content on the mobile site as on the main EuroNews web site. While the stories are a not long (about 5 screenfulls on a 128x160 midrange phone like the Nokia 6101) they are well written. Each story is accompanied by a 130x96 image. In addition to international headline news there are also economic and European news sections. The site is available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Russian.

News from Ireland. The mobile news site of Thomas Crosbie Media which operates several daily newspapers in Ireland. Coverage includes Irish and World news, sports, business news and weather.