Mobile Web Sites

Most new cell phones have Internet access. Unfortunately, mobile surfing is still too expensive for everyday surfing, blogging, or forum posting. Hopefully, prices will go down as VoWLAn and other new techniques hit the consumer market.

Meanwhile, I will use my cell phone browser only in emergency situations - like when I was in California this summer and wanted to know where Google’s headquarters was.

Though mobile surfing still is expensive you should check out these two services. Maybe your company pays your phone bill? nextBLAST and WINKsite are services that let you read news, get alerts, communicate and socialize via your cell phone.

nextBLAST
With this service you can read and subscribe to RSS and Atom news feeds through a mobile device or on the web. Further you can refine the news feeds with filters and tags and have news pushed to you as e-mail, SMS or MMS alerts. nextBLAST is browser based, so there is no need to install anything. If your mobile device has a web browser, it will work, no compatibility worries. The feeds flow to fit the small screen, so there should be no need for horizontal scrolling.

You can use the this service for other things also. Just use your imagination. As an example you can get any image from a Flickr RSS feed, send it to your mobile using nextBLAST, and then use it as a wallpaper. You can also share your photos with friends by subscribing to your own Flickr feed and then using nextBLAST to send a photo to a friend’s phone.

WINKsite
WINKsite has a different consept than nextBLAST. WINKsite is more of an online mobile community thing. WINKsite offers text only sites designed for mobile devices. View others sites or create one yourself. You can create a mobile site of your own without any programming skills - it is very easy. You can then publish your favorite mobile feeds on your mobile site an dread them from your cell phone.

Furthermore, you can choose to activate mobile channels (i.e. mobile chat, forum, community blog and polls). The are a lot of functionality, but still the uer interface is simple and easy to use.

David Harper, co-founder of WINKsite, told me there is a lot of new features in development. Maybe some revenue models for content publishers as well?

Hi, My name is Nicolas Fogelholm, founder of about-nokia.com. I currently own a Nokia 6630 and you can read my Nokia 6630 related posts over here. I come from Nokialand (Finland) and my father’s father’s father’s brother worked at Nokia between 1895 - 1940. My e-mail is nico “at” about-nokia.com. And, yes - English is not my native language - sorry :-).