Wap Review - Women's Interest Life Style Entertainment and Leisure Sites

Mobile web sites targeting women and covering beauty, health, relationships and personal growth.

Oprah Mobile

Content:

Usability:

m.oprah.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Oprah's mobile site offers recent stories from Oprah.com on Health, Style, Relationships, Home & Garden, Food, Entertainment and Money. The image heavy articles are aggressively paginated which makes them readable on low end devices but a chore to navigate on smartphones.

Redbook

Content:

Usability:

m.redbookmag.com (xhtml-mp)

Redbook features fashion, health and relationship advice, profiles of notable people and serial novels.

Good Housekeeping

Content:

Usability:

m.goodhousekeeping.com (xhtml-mp)

Famous for it's Seal of Approval given to products used in the home, Good Housekeeping also has recipes, decorating and remodeling tips as well as short stories - often by well know writers.

House Beautiful

Content:

Usability:

m.housebeautiful.com (xhtml-mp)

An online magazine covering all aspects of home interior decoration.

ESSENCE

Content:

Usability:

m.essence.com/ (xhtml-mp)

ESSENCE is a leading lifestyle, fashion and beauty magazine targeted at African-American women. The mobile site has entertainment news, fashion and beauty tips, recipes, photos and videos. Source Oh! Mobile Directory.

Woman's Day

Content:

Usability:

wap.wd.mlogic.mobi/ (xhtml-mp)
wap.wd.mlogic.mobi (wml)

US shoppers are familiar with Woman's Day magazine which is found on a rack at the checkout counter of virtually every grocery store, a marketing technique that Woman's Day pioneered. The 72 year old magazine, which covers topics of interest to homemakers of both sexes such as food, entertaining, health, childcare and home decorating, has a new mobile edition. Browser detection on the main womansday.com URL should deliver the mobile optimized version to phone browsers or you can go directly to the mobile site at wap.wd.mlogic.mobi.

Content consists of the full text of around 60 short articles from the magazine and full web site. Most articles are illustrated with a single 100 px wide image. The best feature of the site is perhaps the searchable database of hundreds of recipes. Recipes include nutritional information and readers can save their favorites in an online "Recipie Box".

Surprisingly for a new site, Woman's Day mobile supports WML markup in addition to the more modern XHTML-MP. There are still a lot of WML-only handsets in use, particularly on Nextel and in Canada. It's nice to see theWoman's Day designers making the extra effort to make the site available on legacy phones.

ELLE

Content:

Usability:

boost.elle.com/ (xhtml-mp)

ELLE's (boost.elle.com/) a leading women's fashion and entertainment magazine. The ELLE mobile site features book reviews, short articles on fashion trends, shopping, health and beauty along with entertainer profiles and interviews. There are also many photos on the site but only one per page so as not to overwhelm the limited capabilities of mobile browsers. The mobile site was created by Crisp Wireless and as usual with Crisp, production values and usability are excellent.

ELLE girl

Content:

Usability:

boost.ellegirl.com/ (xhtml-mp)

ELLE girl (boost.ellegirl.com/). Elle ceased print publication of ELLE girl last year but the magazine, targeted at teenage girls, continues as a web site and now a mobile web site. The site is similar to Elle Mobile but with the focus on teen fashion, boy bands and young Hollywood stars. There is also a section of relationship advice called simply - Boys.

Seventeen

Content:

Usability:

www.seventeen.mobi/ (xhtml-mp)

The mobile web edition of Seventeen, magazine has fashion photos, reader polls and health, beauty and relationship tips for young women.

Marie Claire

Content:

Usability:

m.marieclaire.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Another Hearst mobile magazine, Marie Claire is an international women's magazine. The mobile edition suffers from the same superficial "made for mobile" content as it's stablemates.

The Lily Review

Content:

Usability:

lily.co.ke/ (xhtml-mp)

Mobile edition of a blog targeted at Kenyan women and offering relationship advice and beauty tips. Mobile version created with the Mobile Pack WordPress plugin. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory.

MobileTude

Content:

Usability:

m.mobiletude.com/ (xhtml-mp)

A "Mobile Magazine for Busy Women" featuring short articles on health, beauty, entertaining, relationships and "getting things done".

Bionic Beauty Blog

Content:

Usability:

bionic-beauty.com (cHtml)

The Bionic Beauty Blog reviews beauty products and gives grooming advice. The mobile edition uses Alex King's WordPress Plugin.

What's This?
QR Code

It's a QR (Quick Response) Code, a type of mobile bar code that you will be seeing a lot more as it's the easiest way to get information from a printed or web page into a mobile phone. This QR Code contains the URL of Google Reader Mobile. When you capture a picture of code with a camera phone running QR Code reader software, the phone's browser open on the Google Reader site. Every mobile site listed on WapReview.com has it's own unique QR code.

Nokia's E90, N93, N93i and N95 ship with a built in QR Code reader and free readers are available for many other camera phones. To learn more and find a reader for your phone visit the WapReview QR Code Page.

Ratings Key :

Content - 0-5

's indicating the quality of the site's writing, depth, timeliness and accuracy.

Usability - 0-5

'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.

Visit WAP Review's companion mobile site with your phone or PDA - YesWAP.com
Yeswap.com has all the links from WapReview.com in a mobile friendly format and includes a proxy which converts html and xhtml sites to wml for older phones.