Amazing Super Bowl win by the underdog New Orleans Saints! But theres no time for sports fans to rest as the next big event on the sports calendar is the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, starting the Friday. This week's Found on the Mobile Web is an Olympics special bringing you the best mobile sites to follow all the games action.
Found on the Mobile Web is a weekly WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the YesWAP.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 2119 mobile sites.
All the Olympics sites listed below can also be found in the Sports/Winter Olympics section of the directory and portal for easy access with your mobile phone.
Vancouver2010 vancouver2010.com/mobile/ The official mobile site of the 2010 Winter Olympics has ticket information, live results, medals, schedules, athlete bios, teams, news and photos. The news section uses a feed from the AFP news agency. The feed items are nicely formatted for mobile and are full items not excerpts. The sheer quantity of news in amazing and a bit overwhelming. The games haven't even started yet and the site already has 65 pages containing over 900 articles in its news section! Unfortunately there is no way to search the news. At 80 KB this works best with smartphones and maybe too large for the embedded browsers of some feature phones..
Vancouver2010 also offers a free iPhone app featuring a location-aware spectator guide, maps to all the venues and real time results.
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NBC Olympics m.nbcolympics.com NBC seems to have one of the biggest and most feature rich Winter Olympics sites. It has news, photos, videos, live results, schedules, medal counts, athlete profiles, video, polls, trivia, TV and online programming grids and Vancouver information. You can sign up on the site to receive a variety of free Email and SMS alerts (US Only) and to customize the mobile site content to emphasize your favorite sport.
NBC also promises free iPhone and BlakcBerry apps that are "coming soon". With the games five days away lets hope that's real soon!
There are about six stories covering today's events plus athlete interviews and prognostication on the likely outcome of upcoming events. The stories are quite in depth for a mobile site. Not surprisingly, coverage emphasizes US athletes.
The site works best on smartphones. It looks great and is easy to navigate on my Android phone, Nokia N95 and using Opera Mini. NBC and their mobile design partner, Starcut Media, made some effort at adapting content to a variety of handsets by varying image and video size and quality but the homepage weighs in at 64 KB, still too large for the embedded browsers of many feature phones.
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BBC Sports news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/mobile/olympic_games/vancouver_2010 generally has excellent Olympics coverage and I expect this year to be no different.. The site offers news, results, photos and Olympic quizzes. At this point there are only a handful of news items on the site but this will surely change once the games get started.
The BBC also has some free Olympics mobile wallpapers for download in various sizes.
Typical of BBC Mobile, page and image sizes are small enough to work with virtually any mobile browser. There's even a version of the site for old WML-only phones.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
February 7, 2010 @ 8:22 pm
7 View Comments
