5 mobile start pages - Mobile Minute

A few years ago trying to browse the web on a PDA or mobile phone was an exercise in futility. Not only was rendering web pages too much work for slow mobile processors, but many mobile devices had anemic screen resolutions of 160 x 160 pixels.

These days a mobile phone has far more processing power than my first computer, and many devices have QVGA or even VGA screens. But mobile browsing is still a very different experience from sitting at your computer and entering URLs with a keyboard and mouse. That's why mobile start pages can be so important.

Sure, you could enter URLs one character at a time, or bookmark every web site you might ever want to visit again. But you can also set as your homepage one site that has links to thousands of pages that are designed specifically for the small screen. This method also has the advantage of letting you access the same content no matter what device or web browser you're using. Here are a few of our favorite mobile start pages.


Tappity

While some mobile start pages present you with a list of links, Tappity (shown above) lets you choose the features of your start page, much the same way that Netvibes or Pageflakes do for desktop browsers.

You have to sign up for a Tappity account using a full fledged browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer. But then you get to choose custom modules. Tappity offers up many options, including Google, Yahoo, news sources like the New York Times or CNN, and mobile versions of Flickr and Wikipedia. You can also enter any url you like and choose to see either the full version or a "mobilized" version of the page.

Pocket Optimized

Pocket Optimized is a rather simple text-based start page offering links everything from news and entertainment to real estate listings. Of course all of the sites are formatted for the mobile screen.

There are two things that make Pocket Optimized stand out. One is that it's multi-lingual with links in English, German, and Polish.

The other nice thing is the simple fact that it shows the number of links to each category from the main page. When using a slow web browser or a slow internet connection, sometimes it's nice to know whether it's worth clicking on a link at all.

Pda Homepage

One of the newer entries to the mobile start page game is Pda Homepage. Don't let the generic name fool you. This is one rather slick little home page. It's not personalized like Tappity, but users are encouraged to submit links tot he author.

Pda Homepage offers you 5 categories of links to mobile-optimized web sites: E-mail, entertainment, shopping, search engines, and information. The first four are pretty much what you'd expect, and the information section covers everything from traffic and mapping web sites to a wine encyclopedia.

Although the design of Pda Homepage looks incredibly simple on a desktop browser, the little icons atop the screen make it one of the most attractive starts pages I've seen on mobile devices. I am, however, a little baffled at the lack of a news section, which is a mainstay of most other pages.

PDA Hotspots

Pda Hotspots has a ton of links covering all the usual topics, including news, weather, search engines, shopping, travel, and even horoscopes.

Under the Radio/Video tab, you can also find links to streaming audio and video from news, financial, sports and entertainment sites. Of course, whether you'll be able to play these streams depends on what type of device you're using.

Probably the best feature of PDA Hotspots is that there appear to be very few dead links. A note on the page states that the author checks all the sites every week for dead or broken links.

Skweezer

Okay, Skweezer isn't strictly speaking a start page. Rather, it's a web service that spits out a mobile-optimized version of any web page that you input. Just enter a URL for an unruly site, and Skweezer will do its best to make that web site look good on your 2.8-inch screen.

You can use Skweezer without registering for an account. But if you sign up, you can also save sites as favorites. And you can use Skweezer just as easily from your desktop or your mobile.

So you can use Skweezer much like Tappity. All you have to do is input the URLs of your favorite sites one at a time, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and save as favorites. Now when you login to Skweezer from any web browser, be it on your phone, PDA, or computer, you can access all of your favorites.

Conclusion

I'm not going to recommend one start page over another. One of the beauties of these pages is that you don't need to make them your homepage to use them. You can bookmark all of these sites and many others and save yourself a lot of browsing time.

One problem with some of the sites like Tappity or Skweezer is that they will often apply their "mobilizing" technology even if you're using them to access a site that is already optimized for mobile viewing. For example, Download Squad has a mobile version, but if you're not aware of that, you may set Tappity to mobilize this site and wind up with a different version. It's probably a matter of personal taste whether you like our default mobile version or Tappity's rendition better.

Another great site to bookmark is Smartphone & PocketPC Magazine's list of mobile resources. It includes several of the sites listed here as well as web pages for streaming mobile videos, playing games, and downloading and installing software.

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