Inspired by Martin's post about the official FIFA World Cup mobile web site, I went looking for other World Cup related mobile content. What follows is a list of what's out there right now. To help you find these sites on your phone I've put up a World Cup page on the yeswap.com mobile portal with links to these sites and will add any more that I see or hear about.
For those of you (mostly Americans) who have no idea what I'm talking about, The FIFA Football (soccer in the US) World Cup finals start June 9. Held every four years, the finals last for a month and involve 32 national teams - one of which will win the cup in the final match in Berlin on July 9th. The World Cup is enormously popular, in fact, it's the most watched sporting event in the world. The last one held four years ago drew a total television audience of over 38.8 billion - a billion plus tuned in for the final match alone. In comparison, the Summer Olympics draws about 4 billion total viewers.
The Official FIFA World Cup mobile site, hosted by Yahoo, is attractively designed and makes good use of color and images. Both layout and image size vary depending of which browser the site detects. It's strictly a WAP2 site, there is no official support for wml-only devices. I've put wml links to this site and several other WAP2-only sites on wml.yeswap.com - follow the menu to Sports/World Cup The html to wml conversion is via a transcoder I wrote. You can also use the Google transcoder to view the official site. Currently on the official site, there's a front page of general news articles, complete schedules of the matches and a page for each team with team roster and team-specific news articles. If you have a Yahoo account, you can login and customize the site by selecting your two favorite teams and two favorite players. If you do the customization thing, the Teams page shows just your two team's schedules and the two player's stats. You can still click an All Teams link to see the default teams page. Other features are a shop where you can buy World Cup themed ringtones, wallpapers and Java Games, a daily poll, a signup screen to receive SMS alerts and another page where you can send a link to the site to your buddies - also by SMS. Best of all ,the site has a (currently disabled) Live link - it looks like they will be providing live coverage of at least some of the matches.
Official FIFA mobile site by Yahoo: xhtml
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The BBC which always has excellent sports reporting has got their World Cup coverage up in two versions. The WAP1 edition has lots of well written in-depth stories illustrated with small (66px wide) .jpg and .gif images. The PDA edition has the same stories but with more and larger images (up to 200 px). Surprisingly the WAP1 site seems to have several features that are missing from the PDA site; a complete schedule and a "Player Rater" where you can vote for the best and worst players in each match and separate news pages for each of the 32 teams.
BBC World Cup: wml cHtml
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posted by Dennis Bournique
June 5, 2006 @ 7:58 pm
7 View Comments
