Mobizines
Delivering useful content to mobile devices is an issue that, for many users, seems yet to be resolved. When WAP first appeared on the scene, phone's had an appallingly low data rate and were unable to deliver much in the way of feature-rich content. That didn't matter, though, because the screens and processing power of the phones didn't facilitate it anyway.
Fast forward to the 3G age, and ask whether the situation is any different. In some respects it is; phones are (a lot) more powerful and data rates are high enough (hail GPRS and 3G) to allow a decent range of content to be delivered. But beyond ring tones and animated screen savers, have the media got their act together and worked out how to deliver decent mobile content?
Indeed, some have, by launching mobile versions of their own sites. These might be WAP, or for more advanced phones, cut-down (X)HTML versions. However, the range of screen sizes, processing power and so forth limit the usability of these pages, unless they're very well written.
So how does Mobizines fit into this? Mobizines is an application for a range of mobiles that allow the delivery of magazine and news content to a mobile. At first that might sound rather like a web browser for a phone, but OS-internal, Opera and others do a reasonable job of that. If I was to throw buzzwords around, I might be inclined to suggest that Mobizines is a piece of middleware that sits between the user and the publication's content.
We've taken a little look at Mobizines for you, in this HEXUS.snapshot.
