Wap Review

Another good general sports news site with extensive coverage of college and profession team sports, tennis, horse racing, motor sports, golf and more.

ESPN is one of the four TV networks that share the rights to broadcast NFL games. Their web site lets fans follow, in real time, any one of the 14 NFL games typically played on Sunday or the single Monday night game. The WAP site delivers almost all the same information. in a very effective and elegant way. BTW, I'm focusing on the ESPN's NFL coverage but ESPN's Web and WAP sites also cover all the major and many of the minor sports. There is live coverage of baseball and basketball but the NFL coverage is the most detailed.

When you visit the ESPN site, the first thing you see is a list of sports. After you choose NFL and then scores from the front page, you see a list of this weeks games with the scores. Scores of games that are finished are marked with an "F" and clicking on them will lead to a typical after game description of how the game unfolded. But selecting a game in progress brings up the screen show in the first image. Here on a single screen, you can see the score, how much time is left, the down, the position of the ball, which team has procession and the outcome of the last play. These are the essential elements that a football fan needs to follow the game. Note that below the critical time-sensitive information is a refresh link. The page doesn't refresh itself presumably out of consideration for those of us on metered data plans. Scrolling "below the fold" will reveal secondary information such as game statistics and links to the pre-game story and a page detailing the scoring plays of the current game (second image).

The ESPN WAP site is certainly not flashy, no images, streaming video or audio. All of those would be nice and I'm sure we will see them when 3G is the norm. The cool thing about this site is it works right now on any WAP enabled phone. It comes in both WAP1 and WAP2 flavors and loads fast. I see sites like this one which are designed for usability with no learning curve and compatibility with all phones to be what will drive initial mass acceptance of mobile browsing. We need to get more users hooked on the mobile web, too many of the current sites are difficult to navigate, prone to throwing errors or require extra steps like signing up on the web, entering passwords or drilling down through endless screens and links to find the little bit of useful information. Badly designed sites make users question the utility of the mobile web. A few bad experiences - maybe only one - will discourage many forever from trying to use the web on their phones.

Excellent US-centric sports site. In depth coverage of all major and many minor sports.

Eurosport (m.eurosport.com) Eurosport Mobile has a new url and a redesigned and much improved site. The front page has been expanded from 5 headlines with daily updates to 10 headlines updated every few minutes and finally there is LIVE coverage, lots of it. At this moment there are live reports from 7 football (soccer to us Yanks) matches, 4 snooker! matches, 2 tennis matches and 2 basketball games. Besides those sports, Eurosport also has extensive coverage of Motor Sports, Cycling, Cricket, Track and Field and Rugby.

NBC Sports (mobile.nbcsports.com) "Sports" is kind of a misnomer for this site. As of this writing in October, 2006 NBC Sports Mobile is covering only one sport - NFL Football. Last week's baseball World Series was never mentioned on NBC Sports Mobile! Not that it's a bad football site - for pigskin fans the site is very good with lots of game photos, scores, player stats, week by week schedules, game recaps, injury lists and news and features about notable players. The one thing that is lacking is live play-by-play or even scores for games in progress, but for that there is always ESPN Mobile (review). I wonder what they'll do when football season ends, switch to covering the NBA perhaps.

A rather weak sports site. Only covers major US sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, PGA, College football and hoops and professional tennis. Each section has scores and just 3 stories. No photos.

Update 7-Jul-2007: The site has been completely redesigned and now has images, coverage of more sports and more and longer stories.

Time Warner's weekly print sport magazine, Sports Illustrated (SI), finally has a mobile web site of its own. For the last few years, Sports Illustrated content has appeared as a section within CNN Mobile (Time Warner also owns CNN) but now it has its own URL m.si.com. The site covers news from MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, NASCAR, Professional Soccer, Golf, Tennis, Cycling, College Football and Basketball and even occasional coverage of high school sports.

SI's numerous writers and columnists are also featured with in-depth articles and opinion pieces. There's live coverage of Major League Baseball, National Football League and National Basketball Association games. The live coverage is not play by play but incudes frequently updated box scores, a summary of scoring plays and statistics.

Mobile site of The Sporting News, a weekly print sports magazine. Comprehensive coverage of mainstream US sports ( MLB | NCAA Basketball, NCAA Football, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL).

cbsSportsline.com: has a new mobile url (cbs.volantis.net/sportsline/) and a new and very attractive site design. The old site was text only, the new one has images resized to browser widths and flashy image gradients. Content's not bad either.

NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Motorsports, Tennis, Soccer and college sports news from AOL's FanHouse, including stats, scores, game results, team schedules and more. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Sports coverage with a British Bent. Well-writen, in-depth stories in the best BBC tradition. The PDA edition of BBC Sport has pages averaging 25 KB of text with images 202 px wide. Works well with PDA's, Smartphones and Opera Mini

The BBC's outstanding sports coverage in light weight wml or xhtml format. WML pages average 2 KB with 66px wide images making this site ideal for users on slow or expensive networks.

FlashScore.mobi is a fast livescore website optimized for mobile phones. It shows current live soccer, hockey, tennis, baseball, basketball and American football scores from around the world.  Source Tappity

British based site covers Soccer, Rugby, Cricket, Golf, Track and Field, Tennis, Snooker and Forumula One.

Mobile site of South Africa's SuperSport pay TV network.  The site features Rugby, Soccer, Cricket, Golf and Motorsport news and photos and registers over a million page views per month. Source Mobility.mobi

The Score is a  Canadian cable TV sports chanel.  The Score's mobile site covers all major North American professional sports with news, information, highlights, schedules, betting line and live scores. As befits the name, The Score Mobile's front pages consists of the latest live scores for a single sport, currently NBA basketball.  You can customize The Score Mobile to show a different sport or league on the front page and adjust the auto refresh frequency and set your time zone. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

TNSGroup's directory of links to over 275 NCAA Division I University sporting websites. That's over 80% of all Division I schools. The links are arranged by conference so it's easy to find your Alma Matter or school of interest. Great resource for college sports fans.

Official site of the The Southeastern Conference (SEC) which features some of the strongest schools in US college sports including football powerhouse Alabama and perennial NCAA women's basketball champions Tennessee. The conference's mobile site has live scores, news, standings and schedules. Source: Mobile Mammoth

The National Hockey League (NHL) which is professional hockey in the US and Canada has launched a slick new mobile site at m.nhl.com.  It includes a mobile version of NHL Game Center which displays today's games with live scores in a grid.  Clicking on a game row opens a view with a summary of scoring plays  from that game.  Game Center has a history feature that lets you to skip back a day at a time  to  see a recap of  the scoring of  completed games.  There doesn't appear to be a way to jump directly to a specific day, however.

The site also has  news, scores, standings, statistics and photos.  There is are also  "Videos"  and "MyNHL links which go to a "Coming Soon" page.   I wish designers wouldn't waste clicks and bandwidth on comeons like that.  NHL Mobile adapts nicely to various devices, delivering a simple, mostly text version to basic phones, a more richly formatted one with plenty of  images, as shown in the screenshot) to phones with full web browsers like the Nokia N95 and a very nice iPhone specific  design.  Curiously, Opera Mini gets the dumbphone version. The site design is by Quatro Wireless.

The official mobile site of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, a U.S. based martial arts genre that allows fighters to combine skills and moves from boxing, wrestling, judo, karate in a championship series designed to pick the best fighter from any discipline of martial arts. The site has news, free streaming videos and an event calendar.  Mobile site design is by Quattro Wireless.  Source Tappity

Mobile version of MileSplit.US which covers U.S. high school track & field and cross country with results, rankings, articles, photos, statistics and a forum. Source: Mobility.mobi

Fuel is an extreme sports channel from the Fox television network in the US.  Fuel's mobile site has skateboarding, snowboarding, motocross, surfing, BMX and FMX. news and photos. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Skateboard, Snowboard, Surfing and BMX news, videos, blogs and event calendar.  Slick looking site but page size of over 80 KB maybe a problem for feature phone browsers

Skateboarding magazine with interviews of top skaters, event calendars and result, news and gossip.

Official site of World Wrestling Entertainment, the "sport" of professional wrestling.  The slick looking mobile site has news, results, schedules of TV shows, live events and star appearances. There are ringtones, wallpapers, videos and a subscription text alert service available for purchase. Source Mobility.mobi

Phans is a new mobile site for fans of all the Philadelphia sports teams, the Eagles, Phillies and 76'ers.  The site has a forum-like open blog where all registered users can post. There is also a photo gallery and links to sports news from ESPN. With the Phillies in the World Series this year the site should be pretty lively.

Registration can be done right on the mobile site, a plus.  However, registration requires giving your mobile number. As the site has no privacy policy and doesn't give any indication what the numbers are used for I consider this risky.  Fortunately the mobile number doesn't seem to be verified. I just registered using the number of a telemarketer who SPAMed my mobile.

Well written articles on mostly British sports including cricket and rugby. Also, good Formula One coverage

Full text of articles from the sports section of the Washington Times newspaper

Covers all the professional sports with odds and online pools.

Northland Outdoors features hunting, fishing, recreational sports, classified ads  and destination news for the Upper Midwest including Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and South Dakota.

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.