Thu 20 Sep 2007
Mowser is a new service allows us to view Web on our mobile phone. Mowser takes XHTML pages and transcodes them so that we can see them on the mobile device’s screen. There are two advantages of transcoding:
- The data transferred to your device will be less than the original ones. If you don’t have unlimited data plan, this will save you some money.
- Many Web sites are not designed for small screen of mobile device. Personally, I don’t like doing horizontal scrolling. Mowser will reformat the page so that you don’t need to do horizontal scrolling.
The idea is actually not new. A couple of months back, I have reviewed Skweezer, which offer the same service. Opera Mini also has similar service with different approach.
Mowser is founded by Russel Beattie, a famous blogger in the mobile world. He used to have work for Yahoo! before he decided to start and develop Mowser.
What can we do with Mowser? You can enter a URL of a Web site and transcode it to mobile version. The screenshot below shows S60.com viewed without Mowser.
The following pictures show S60.com viewed from Mowser. As you can see, now you don’t need to do horizontal scrolling.
One feature that I really like from Mowser is that you can search information from many different services by using keywords. For example:
- “gs” to search on Google Web.
“ys” to search on Yahoo Web.
“ls” to search on Microsoft’s Live.com.
“eb” to search on eBay.
“wi” to search on Wikipedia.
and many more
The following picture show some example of search feature using Yahoo!
This one is searching using eBay.
Bonus Links
- Faster and Cheaper Web Loading with Skweezer
- Featured Freeware - Opera Mini
- Wikipedia on S60 Devices
RSS 2.0
September 21st, 2007 at 12:55 am
Great article for those who didn´t know already, Antony! Both services in fact work real smoothly with both having their pros and cons. And yes, Opera is another nice solution.
But there are two other options for websites and more than three for videosites available you and your readers may not know about, so i thought i´d mention them.
* There is another browser available called “TeaShark”. It´s Java-based but renders websites nearly as perfect as the internal web-browser does. It also has some proxying functions similar to Operas to downsize websites efficiently.
* Best option to render Websites for mobile use is through serverside detection and presentation. At least in my eyes. If you run a Wordpress Blog simply the best plugin to achieve that is the “Wordpress mobile” plugin. It renders a webpage just normally for a “normal desktop browser” and a reduced version for all mobile browsers (only overrideable with opera and teashark afaik, which would even be able to render the webpage as usual on mobile phones)
If you like to watch videos on your mobile phone there are also several options and services that offer content optimized for mobile use:
* ORB is THE killer app in my eyes if you have your (windows only!) PC online 24/7 and a large multimedia repository on it behind a fast line. Saves you the time converting the vids/audio and transferral to your mobile phone. Simply access your computer from the internal webbrowser and stream all your media right to it! It´s aware of the dimensions of your browser and also of it´s connection speed and downsizes the content accordingly!
* “TinyTube” offers mobile content from various sources
* “YouTube” also has a special mobile Version with not as much content as on the normal site yet, but that´s just a matter of time i guess..
* “SRobbin mobile Video” is a comparable service to Tinytube, but offers it´s content in MP4/DivX Format
Hope i could provide some more interesting stuff. Just do a search for the names in quotes and you´ll find more info about them. Didn´t know if it was appropriate to post all those links here. You can also do a search for each of them on my blog, guess you´ll find some more there..
Have a nice weekend,
phanthomas from symbian60.mobi
September 21st, 2007 at 6:51 am
Wow… that’s a very long comment. I can put that in another posting.
September 22nd, 2007 at 3:09 am
Sorry, hope it was not too long and that it stayed informational. If you need detailed info, just holla - you know where to find my mail-addy, don´t you?