Toluu

Wap Review

MySpace Mobile Adds VideoYesterday

I just saw this on VentureBeat. MySpace has added video to their mobile site, m.myspace.com. Thanks to MySpace's original association with bands and music, it has tens of thousands of videos, especially music videos. It makes sense to make them available on mobile.

I took a look at the mobile video offering and it is live and it works but it's very limiting and not particularly user friendly.

To watch MySpace videos on your phone you have to jump through a number of hoops:

• First you have to have a "compatible" phone. I couldn't find a list of what MySpace considers compatible so I used Firefox's User Agent Switcher to impersonate a number of phones. I confirmed that MySpace will let you watch videos on the Nokia N95 and N80, LG Voyager, Motorola RAZR2 V9, Samsung Instinct and Blackjack II. I'm sure there are other supported phones but among the dozen or so User Agents I tried those were the only ones that MySpace enabled the video link for. Notable video capable phones that MySpace doesn't currently support include the Nokia N73, AT&T Tilt, Motorola Z8, Sony Ericsson Z750a, the original BlackJack, iPhone and T-Mobile G1!

Delivr - Simple, Powerful Mobile SharingYesterday

Winksite founder David  Harper just showed me a project that he's been working on.  It's a new way to share all sorts of web content to mobile. The brand new service, separate from Winksite, is called Delivr.

Delivr is a very slick mash up of a URL shortening service with email, SMS, a QR code generator and some of the most popular web services; YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, Reddit, Google Maps, Google Translate, Twitter, Jaiku, Plaxo, Reddit and Delicious.

Delivr has two main functions.  One is as a mobile and content aware URL shortening service.  Use Delivr to share a web page, video on YouTube, a photo on Flickr or a location in a mobile friendly format.  It works a little like TinyURL,  Delivr creates a short URL that you can share.  But unlike TinyURL, where you have to copy and paste the URL into the service or media you want to share it on, Deliver has built in one click sharing with SMS, email or on Facebook, MySpace,  Twitter or any of the other services that Delivr supports.  Also unlike a TinyURL, when someone clicks on a Deliver their browser loads a mobile friendly landing page (which works well in PC browsers too).  The Delivr landing pages give the option of viewing either a mobile formatted version of the cont

Snappr - Mobile Price ComparisonDecember 1

Continuing with the holiday shopping theme I started yesterday, Snappr (snappr.mobi) is an online shopping search and price comparison site.  It's the mobile variant of Snappr.net on the web. Snappr is new, both the .net and the .mobi launched this year.

The mobile site opens to a simple search box where you can enter a product name or the number that appears under the UPC bar code found  on most products.  Snappr returns a list of products with price, a picture and user rating if available. The site is available in English and German and can be used anywhere in the world.

Does this sound familiar?  Snappr is a near clone of Barcle which I reviewed in Feburary.  To Snappr's credit, it's a more attractive site than Barcle and seems to work better too.  Searching is much faster and the bar code database seems more complete.  In a quick test with three products, a prepaid mobile phone, a book, and an analog to digital TV converter box, Snappr found the phone and the book, while Barcle found none of the items.  Plus, Snappr shows prices in the search results list, while Barcle requires you to drill down into each item's detail page to find the cost.

It's no

Mobile Web Bargain HuntingNovember 30

How's your holiday shopping going? Spending more than you like?  Here are a couple of mobile web sites to help you find the best deals.

CheapenGadget (cheapengadget.com) is a new site from MechaWorks, publisher of PhoneNews.com. It's a blog style "Deal" site that's updated several times a day with the best deals on consumer electronics, computers, mobile phones and accessories both on the web and in stores.

Christopher Price and his team at MechaWorks did a great job of leaking the Black Friday ads of the major retailers days and even weeks ahead of time, now they are doing the same thing for CyberMonday which is tomorrow.

The mobile version of CheapenGadget uses the same template as PhoneNews. It does a decent job of making the site easier to use with most phone browsers.  The front page has summaries of the last 20 posts, a search box and a list of categories. It's 30 KB of text, which is too large to load on some feature phones and takes a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom.  Cutting the number of posts per page in half would make the site easier to use and compatible with more phones.  Individual posts are smaller but watch out for the links to the

New Carnival of the MobilistsNovember 30

Be sure to check out the latest Mobilist's Carnival. It's at All About Iphone.net where Steve Litchfield of The Smartphones Show and 3-Lib fame is making a surprise appearance as guest host.

There's a lot of new and hot stuff this week including first looks at Nokia's 5800 and N79  and coverage of the recent "Future of Mobile" conference.

There are also product reviews of the T-Mobile G1, "FastLane Street Racing" for the iPhone and my own examination of the Skyfire browser on S60.

Also a  piece on the South African mobile web scene, where in spite of huge growth in number of users, major web brands are staying away.

Steve Litchfield's only partially tongue in check comparison of the Psion 3a organizer with current smartphones is included. Steve points out that in many ways we are worse off in terms of the features and usability of our devices than we were 15 years ago.

Items on Femtocells, iPhones in the enterprise and the N-Gage Arena round out the Carnival's collection of the best recent writing on mobile topics. Don't miss COTM 152, it's a good one.