There’s a debate raging over how traditional Web sites should be viewed on mobile devices. We’ve been hearing that many users aren’t happy with the options provided by Novarra, which we posted about earlier this week. This is an issue we’re going to monitor very closely.
So today we heard from BareSite.com, and despite the name it isn’t a mobile porn site. Actually, BareSite was developed to make mobile browsing easy. The company has developed a Web based browser that “strips” Web sites of what they call all “unneeded content,” and create an extremely light mobile version that can be displayed on mobile devices, and on average according to the company sites are crunched over 90 percent.
This is a Web based, rather than browser based solution, and no downloads are required. Users retain full control over appearance and browsing settings, and users can enter URLs, feeds or even choose from a directory that holds 100 of the most popular Web sites. Registration is not needed and no ads are displayed.
This is very handy. On my BlackBerry sites load very fast and are presented in a nice way. Before this there was no way I could browse some sites, because they messed up the screen and took ages to load.
I especially like that it automatically detects feeds. When I enter mobilecrunch.com, it recognizes the feed and displays it instead of trying to display the normal contents.
Strange name though!
I’m hoping that services like these won’t be necessary once the iPhone pushes mobile browsing into desktop levels of functionality. Here’s hoping.
The name doesn’t seem so bad to me – they are making sites ‘bare’ after all.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! among many other 3rd party services provide adaptive rendering technology that help render regular websites on mobiles. When no feeds are available, this service does very poorly. So, I am not sure displaying feeds is an acceptable alternative, given these more sophisticated solutions.
Check out http://www.wsdot.wa.gov, for example. They do have a mobile site, hidden among many links on their site. I would expect this service to pick up on that and show that, but instead, it tries to render the website for my mobile and the result is of much lower quality than that of AR solutions such the ones mentioned above or InfoGin, Novarra and alike.
Tried it and like it a lot. The favorite function and most visited function make browsing much easier. Pretty cool. Like Neil I wonder how iPhone will compare to this.
Hi Guys,
Google does this already; it can translate a site from one format to another. Here is what I did to translate my blog to WML for mobile browsing:
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcorruptedpartition.blogspot.com%2F&_gwt_pg=2&hl=tl&mrestrict=wml&q=corruptedpartition&source=m&output=wml&site=search
then I made a shorter URL using tinyurl.com:
http://tinyurl.com/ts7me
this kind of transcoding removes advertisements also ? this is a bad proposition to content publishers . is there a way for a publisher to opt out ?