Wap Review

In LA for the Oscars?  Don't miss visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2500 pink and bronze stars set in three and a half miles of sidewalk beginning at the corner of Hollywood and La Brea. Each star is dedicated to a great performer or fictional character from  motion pictures, live theater, radio, television or recording.

You can buy overpriced maps of the Walk of Fame at tourist traps all over the LA area but there's a better way to navigate the walk and it's free. dotMobi's James Pierce has created an interactive mobile guide to the Walk of Fame.

It's at hwof.mobi and is a map based turn by turn guide to the entire route.  As you travel along the route you can read  biographic information about the recipient of each star at your  feet.

You can also search for a star by name or browse through listing of recipients in each of the five categories (motion pictures, live theater, radio, television or recording). Each star has it's own page with a photo of the sidewalk star, biography of its recipient and a map of the star's location. There is also a history of the walk and directions to the starting point.  If you are lost, the site's "Where am I" feature lets you type in a street name to pull up a map to get your bearings. Hwof.mobi is a great example of using mobile context to deliver information relevant to the user's location and activity.

People Magazine is a US weekly print magazine that is a top seller on newsstands. Owned by Time Inc., People is know for its celebrity coverage and human interest stories. People Magazine bids aggressively for interviews and exclusive rights to photos and has scored a number of scoops including the first photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby and Jenifer Lopez' twins.

The magazine has a popular website at people.com and recently launched a mobile website, m.people.com. The mobile site mirrors the content of people.com with about 100 "news" stories about movie and TV stars and other celebrities, around the same number of celebrity photos plus a dozen movie, music, TV show and book reviews. There are also supposed to be videos in both Windows Media and mpeg4 formats, however the half dozen links I tried all returned "File Not Found" errors.

Other than the broken video links the site is well done from a design and usability standpoint. Page sizes, photo width, video format and markup (xhtml or wml) are all optimized to match the capabilities of your handset. Source: oh.dirlink.mobi

With no change in the URL, this site, which started out has the mobile edition of British tabloid "The Daily Mirror", has morphed into "Showbizfree Mobile"

Showbizfree seems to be one of the better sites for free multimedia content. There are more than 300 wallpapers, 30+ movie trailers and over 70 MirrorTV episodes on the site. The wallpapers all seem to be 240x320px in size. It would be nice if the site re-sized them to fit your phone's screen size but that doesn't seem to be the case. MirrorTV episodes are short, averaging 10 seconds in length, 176x144px in resolution and with an average file size of about around 300KB. Movie trailers are the same resolution but much longer and can be over 2MB in size, something to watch out for if you are on a metered data plan or are worried about hitting the cap on an "unlimited" plan.

ShowbizFree pages are a little on the large size for low end phones, averaging 34KB (20KB is generally considered the maximum page weight for a site that will work well in all mobile browsers). This is reflected in the site's Ready.mobi rating. On the five point Ready.mobi scale, ShowbizFree got a Two (Bad, "...will probably display very poorly on a mobile phone").

Enterainment blog featuring music, videos, news, and opinions with a youthful, urban slant. Mobile View by Mobify.

Free downloadable user created Java magazines and videos. The site is famous (or infamous) for the How to Roll a Joint video it briefly hosted. The magazines are entertainment themed and the ones I tried were free from controversy and quite nicely done. Unfortunately, the wml download pages have un-escaped ampersands in URLs which will prevent them from working on some phones. See Validation is Your Friend for some tips on how to avoid this on your mobile site.

Update: 7-Sept-2008: Site is up but creating and downloading magazines fails.

Mindzai (mindzai.mobi) Mobile edition of Mindzai.tv an arts and design blog covering fashion, photography, video. Lots of nice photos on this site although they aren't resized for mobile making some of the pages too big, as much as 150KB, to load on many phones.

A specialty mobile portal featuring a comprehensive set of links to mobile entertainment sites. A good example of a fluid table based design that looks good all sizes of mobile screens. Not so good is that here are too many links on the front page for good usability.

Blog style news , review and comentary site for car lovers.

Smartimes magazine is a blog dedicated to the Daimler AG "Smart" car.  The site contains articles from smart club members around the world. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

An automotive fan site. Reviews of the latest dream machines and some cars that regular folks drive. News of upcoming new models and industry gossip.

Mobile edition of SciFi magazine and television's SciFi channel. Includes program guide for SciFi Channel, blog, message board and news of upcoming SciFi movies and SciFi star gossip. There's alternate PDA version at scifi.com/handheld/ which has longer versions of the news items but is missing other features like the blog

Disney's official mobile site looks like lots of fun for children of all ages. There are free online games, movie trailers, a "Radio Disney" channel featuring teen-themed music and much more including a special page of games, activities and videos just for preschoolers. On the practical side the site also has TV schedules, Disney on Ice tour schedules and information on Disney theme parks.

The coolest feature is probably the personalized Disney character voice tones generator. It lets you create ringtones with Tigger, Mini or Donald speaking your child's name and other customizable information like a favorite food.

However there are some things about the Disney site that seem poorly thought out. Radio Disney uses a voice call rather than using streaming media so the sound quality is awful. I'm also not impressed with the site's adaptation to the huge variety of mobile devices in the market. There is some attempt made to adjust page and image sizes to browser capabilities but the minimum page size seems to be about 76 KB. The big, image and JavaScript heavy site does work reasonably well on my Android phone and Nokia N95. However, I'm pretty sure that it's too large to even load on most of the low end prepaid feature phones I see kids carrying. Plus the page layout seems optimized to 240x320 or larger screens and doesn't scale well to smaller ones.

Visitors Guide to Walt Disney World - what's where, what open when in the Magic Kingdom, restaurant menus, transportation and weather.

ThrillNetwork.com is a roller coaster and amusement park fan site. The mobile edition of ThrillNetwork (mobile.thrillnetwork.com) is aimed at PDAs and Smartphones and works best on devices with screens at least 220px wide and able to handle pages up to 100 KB in size including images. The site also works very in Opera Mini. If you want to visit ThrillNetwork with a typical phone's built in browser you should probably use a transcoder like Skweezer or Google's.

ThrillNetwork Mobile features ride and park reviews and ratings and an amusement industry news section with announcements of new rides and parks. Registered users can comment on the news and rate and write reviews of coasters and and parks. Anyone can read the news and reviews and search for rides and parks. For each park there is a list of the major rides with links to each ride's rating and review. The site also features several lists; top rated steel coasters, top rated wooden coasters, most visited rides and most visited parks. ThrillNetwork is great fun for anyone who enjoys amusement parks and their rides or who has children who do.