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Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces
I’m part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I’ve been thinking about mobile interfaces lately… so I’m trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface… one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they’ve made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I’m looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful… because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn’t try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni’s list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):
- http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong… is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I’m pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9’s Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don’t know what the ideal experience for that would be.
On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
Thoughts on this post? Feel free to reach out on Bluesky!