Last month I wrote a post, Explosion in African Mobile Browsing about the rapid adoption of the mobile web in many African countries. Opera Mini Traffic from the continent is up 180% since the beginning of the year, Admob reported huge gains from several African nations and I've seen 88% growth in African traffic to wapreview.mobi in the last three months
I took that as a cue to try and find some African mobile news sites to add to the WapReview Mobile Directory and YesWap.com mobile portal. A few minutes with Google's mobile search yielded a number of hits. Here are the top ten. All are filed in the News/International/Africa folder of the directory and portal.
The Standard (eastandard.net/m) is Kenya's oldest newspaper (founded 1902). The Nairobi based daily has full-length news articles from the paper's News, Business and Sports sections as well as an editorial page, columnists and letters to the editor. Most stories are illustrated by a single news photo. The images are not re-sized, and at up to 350px in width increase page size beyond the limits of some phones.
Breaking News Kenya (breakingnewskenya.com) A Dallas, Texas based news blog which gathers stories about Kenya and Kenyans from a variety of sources. The mobile edition was created using the wp-pda WordPress plugin and allows readers to comment on stories.
Daily Nation (mobile.nation.co.ke) - The largest newspaper in Kenya and East Africa. The paper was featured in the 2000 documentary film titled The Daily Nation. The paper's text only mobile site uses small page sizes and should work with any phone. There are about 30 full length articles from the News, Politics, Sports and Business sections of the paper's PC web site.
The East African (mobile.theeastafrican.co.ke) is a weekly news magazine by the same publisher as Daily Nation. It covers news from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. The site uses the same basic design as its parent with 20 articles evenly divided between News, Business, Op/Ed and Magazine sections
The Daily Trust (dailytrust.com) This Nigerian daily newspaper's mobile site has about a dozen top stories, local and international weather forecasts and a currency converter. All stories have a reader comment form and most are illustrated with a single image. The site's usability is hampered by it's slowness.
Nigeria Best Forum (nigerianbestforum.com) A Nigerian online community created using the Open Source
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 16, 2008 @ 10:31 pm
7 View Comments
