Review: Best Websites on your Cell

Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 8:30 pm. 1 comment
Posted in AOL, Cell, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo.

AOL, Google, and Windows Live, have been the biggest players in providing websites for your cell. In the world of WAP, there is limited amount of space and bandwith. Its essential to create sites that are easy to use with quick load times.  We’ll divulge into each one of these as well as others suggested by you.

AOL Mobile: Had a strong hold on WAP in the beginning, but it has gotten weaker since its competitors have been pretty much doing the same thing. AOL Mobile has provided an easy to use set of links to its various services. The news area is its worst, providing the least amount of news compared to the other networks. It features only major stories in whichever catergory you choose. The news articles are short and don’t provide much reading entertainment. Its Mail feature is pretty much the highlight of the whole thing. Your able to read mail very easily and switch to another place. The new AOL Feed Reader, is a wonderfull suggestion, unfotunately it doesn’t work as well. Its major problem is that it doesn’t remember what feeds you add, and this could seriously be fixed if they made you login to view your feeds. Your better off using this for a quick read for those hard to reach sites. AOL search which was the pioneer before google to format pages with images to your phone, is a little on the heavy side. I quickly run out of memory and recieve Page can not be displayed messages. Mapquest provides the best directions as always, but their maps are a little too detailed for mobile phones. The rest of the WAP portal isn’t really worth your time. Score: 75%

Google Mobile: After AOL held the market long enough, Google’s main focus was to launch its own search page that formatted webpages with images to your phone. Google offers a better way of doing it since it breaks up a webpage into small chunks. Sometimes the chunks are so small that you’ll end up with 17 pages with pure nonsesense on it before you finally reach something good. Google puts up a good fight in its other services such as Google Maps. Its first a little tricky since a radio button must be selected and you have to type in something for it to search. You’ll usually get annoyed by it thinking you should type in a city and state. What it actually does is put your search box in the "WHAT" catergory, and then you type the location in the WHERE catergory. Driving directions are good and the maps are somewhat blurry but still they load quite fast. Gmail is another feature that isn’t much things going on in it. The biggest thing to do is be able to view pictures in email. You can also download a picture formatted to your phone. Google’s biggest drawback is its Google News area. Its loaded with HUGE TEXT for the catergories, making it annoying to search through. The news seems to be preselected with certain sites and because of this some news items are outdated. Trying to find news through the catergories is pretty dull. You’ll get a few news stories and then it mysteriously ends as if there isn’t any more news on that subject.  Score: 70%

Yahoo Mobile: The news section takes over as its biggest and well designed area. First all news catergories lead to sub-catergories. You’ll easily find the news you want to read and also since there is one pic per news story, pages load very fast. The news listings are compareable to digg. You’ll find lots of interesting stories by date. The back and next buttons are convieniently numbered so you can easily reach to the pages you want. Unfortunately there is no way of going back from a sub-catergory, meaning you’ll have to retype the site if you’d like to choose another subcatergory. The site saves your location for movies and weather. An easy saved list of your most recent locations are stored on the site. There is also a Y2Go! service which doesn’t support my phone. Score: 80%

Windows Live Mobile: Another portal site with basically the same features as the others. The biggest let down is the news section where huge new headlines dominate the screen. You must first scroll accross these huge headlines before you reach down to the catergories.  Every news article has a picture similar to Yahoo’s however they chose  a bigger maximized picture which takes some time to load. Another annoying thing is at the top, where a grey MSN logo appears. Due to this, my phone freezes a bit as it passes by. The weather section is nice but it closes the browser as it redirects itself to someplace else. Other features such as lottery makes it  much easier to view scores instead of going to the state’s horribly confusing lottery website. In my network they even included a chatroom/message board area. Even though its a totally seperate company, Windows Live mobile has more advanced communication tools than the rest.  Score: 60%