Best mobile websites – and notes on mobile browsing

Some time back, I made a list of best practices for creating a mobile-optimized website. For some inexplicable reason, it seems not all companies have followed my advice yet To highlight some of the better sites, however, I thought I’d write this short post about sites I use most from my phone; it’s worth mentioning that we’re talking about Nokia N82 in this case, as the sites may not appear similar on devices other than Nokia’s N/E-series handsets.

Why so few sites? Well, even if browsing is tolerable on a smartphone, it’s still a far cry from something you’d actually enjoy doing as such. If a big-screen PC is available, I’d rather use that thank you very much. Browsing on the smartphone is really limited to situations where nothing else is available – like when killing time on a bus or a train, for example.

As a result, I tend to focus these short periods of browsing time on relatively few sites. In the order of time spent, these are the sites along with respective screenshots that I use the most: (apologies to the international readers for the couple local sites which are utterly useless for everyone except those living in the Helsinki area)

NY Times at http://mobile.nytimes.com – already highlighted earlier, this is my favorite mobile-optimized site. Interesting and useful stories, well presented with the appropriate amount of photos. Considering the phone’s capabilities, I really couldn’t ask for much more.

Of course, there is a minor annoyance with one ad at the top of the page, but that falls into the acceptable-category.


Helsingin Sanomat at http://m.hs.fi/ is best for local Finnish news; the new site works well enough, even though the ads along with the title & navigation bars takes up too much space at the beginning of the page (see the screenshot). Still it works sufficiently well and includes the occasional photo.

I also like the URL. If only all mobile sites were this fast and conveniently named. The “m” prefix should become a de facto-standard if you ask me; .mobi is a bad idea but everyone who owns their domain should have no problems in making the mobile-version prefix “m” (and have the mobile-prefix as an alias also)


Facebook at http://m.facebook.com.

The mobile-optimized Facebook site is a very crippled version, but it’s still useful for status updates and quick checks. A good mobile interface is essential for things like Facebook – otherwise, one’s status would always be something boring like “at home” or “at work” like you see from time to time.. (Names removed from the screenshot here to protect the innocent.)

The Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/wireless is another mostly well-done mobile newspaper version, despite the long URL. Downsides are that there are practically no photos and it could use category links on every page – but it also shows that making a relatively functioning mobile site does not need to be a a major undertaking. This is the kind of site that one should be able to pull out of any half-decent CMS with not much trouble at all.


YTV Journey Planner at http://aikataulut.ytv.fi/reittiopas-pda/fi/ is one of the most useful mobile sites ever, despite the horrible URL that’s a pain to type before bookmarking it. The Journey Planner basically tells you what public transportation to take to get from Point A to Point B, along with schedules and route maps.

Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/m/view is a nice interface for accessing your bloglist on Google Reader on the move. Nothing fancy but it works nicely enough; unfortunately at least on the Nokia phones, it doesn’t remember your login information for very long (i.e. not days or weeks), so you have to occasionally re-login which is a bit of a pain.

Rain radar at http://testbed.fmi.fi/

This is an exception in the sense that the site is not mobile-optimized. Still, it’s simple enough to be usable on the phone and the service it offers (Doppler rain radar + temperatures of the metropolitan area) is so useful it deserves to be on the list.

Who’s missing?

The above sites are quite sufficient for most purposes, but I would really like to see the following sites come up with better mobile versions:

• The Economist
• CNN
• Several forums, mostly running PHPBB or vBulletin; their mobile versions suck.
• IMDB