Category: PDA

Yahoo! seems to be trying to provide more than one way for us to use their services from a mobile device. The client software for Yahoo! Go provides an attractive interface but was very slow on my Pocket PC and wasted too much screen real estate IMHO. Recently, it looks like they took the content from wap.oa.yahoo.com mobile web portal and moved it to…

m.yahoo.com

This mobile web portal has the same lightweight and lightning fast mostly-text interface from the wap design and added the oneSearch feature that provides a mixed result page that reminds me of Google’s SearchMash site. oneSearch returns results categorized as Web (all of the web), Mobile Web (results of pages that look good on a mobile device), and Web Images.

Tumblr is a free web tumblog (sort of a minimalist blog format) service that lets you quickly post text, links, photos, videos and other data. I just noticed the other day that it also provide a mobile device display friendly format. Just add a /mobile after a tumblog’s URL. You can see the mobile display version of my tumblog, for example, at:

http://mobileviews.tumblr.com/mobile

Do you Twitter? It seems like everyone is either Twitter-ing or Jaiku-ing these days. And, those who aren’t, seem to be life-casting. But, sharing your life via text seems a lot cheaper and easier to do than videocasting your life. The one exception may be those who chose to use Twitter via SMS and found a large text messaging bill the next month (unless they had unlimited SMS service, of course).

Twitter has a new mobile browser friendly site at…

http://m.twitter.com/

…that lets the rest of us (assuming a decent mobile data service bandwidth) twitter on the go using a mobile device with a web browser.

BusinessWeek appears to be trying out two different approaches to providing content to mobile devices. Their original Handheld Edition (right side of image) found at http://pda.businessweek.com/ has a simple clean interface that provides a lot of textual content per click (think Google). Their newer dot-mobi site found at http://www.businessweek.mobi/ looks somewhat graphically richer (think Yahoo or MSN) but provides much less textual content per click. You need to make a lot of clicks and endure download pauses to read a whole article. Essentially we have form-over-content (the dot-mobi site) vs. content-over-form (the PDA site). I hope BusinessWeek maintains both presentation options since it is pretty certain that both will appeal to different types of readers. We can only hope other content producers follow BusinessWeek’s lead in experimenting with mobile content presentation.

GrandCentral, the free web voicemail system (among other features) added a mobile web interface to let you check on voicemail from your phone or PDA. You can it at:

http://grandcentral.com/mobile

I’m sure the feature has been around for a while but I only noticed this evening that you can create document files in Google Docs by sending email to it. After logging in to Google Docs, click on the Upload link to read detailed information about how you can bring in foreign files (Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, for example) into Google Docs. If you move your eyes down the page a bit more, you’ll see instructions on how to create text documents by email (no spreadsheets yet). It works like this: Google assigns a unique email address to you in the form of username-secretstring@prod.writely.com (Google bought Writely to get their web based word processing techology). You can then either send a simple text email file or an attachment. The text on the subject line becomes the Google Docs document name. And, the text body or attached document file becomes the document text (translated to HTML).

The availability of QWERTY thumb keyboards on current generation phones makes this a simple and convenient way to quickly create easily accessible documents without the need to sync the mobile device by tethering it to a desktop or notebook computer. And, since I view the battle with Microsoft’s ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center to be a losing one, anything that gets me away from those sync solutions is a good thing.