Mobis reduced to junk.

[Creature]

Mobis reduced to junk. Well maybe not.

However, travelling home on the train today from London to Cardiff and as we passed Reading at 125mph, I typed in my regular PC large format news site into my Nokia mobile phone: www.bbc.co.uk/news.

I was surprised to be directed to www.bbc.co.uk/mobile with what seemed like the same news content but on the small format. It seemed that some clever spark had found a way to switch the format but keep the content.

I was left wondering if someone had really found a way to swich the format and keep the content. Or had they just paid someone to type the site out again on the small scale. Would this affect the long term value of my mobi names? What do you think?

Luckily these questions quickly sent me to sleep for the rest of the journey :greensleep:

[VentiMocha]

It's ASP coding that allows this, and several sites do it...including google.com when you check it out on your phone.

[whitebark]

It's a simple browser sniffer - and people like myself have been pointing this out to the crazed mobi fanatics but they refuse to listen. This has been around for a while now for different uses, and this is the mobile application.

And as everyone's mobile device matures they won't even need to be redirected - the mobile device will read the website code as the author intended it without any special sniffers, coding etc.

[DaveZilla]

This has always been the case. However some sites dont automatically redirect, and will be www.domain.com/mobile while others will be www.domain.com/wap.

Since the public cant remember which is which .mobi is set to standardize the location of mobile sites.

Many .mobis will just redirect you to the existing www.domain.com/mobile site for companies that have the resources to do browser detection. But for others, now nobody has to remember all that extra crap.

<company name>.mobi is all you need, and you know you'll find a mobile site there.

[WorldRadio.mobi]

Yes it is possible to detect the accessing device with any domain extension and forward to the right code.

However .mobi gives the user/consumer the power to know that this site is optimized for the small browser screen on PDA and mobile.

Although big sites do have mobile content to redirect to, the countless valuable medium and small sites do not. Therefore the user of a mobile device currently ends up having to play a guessing game whether or not he can read a large scrolling site (Yuck).

I suggest more and more .mobi speculators should also try using one of the latest PDAs to detect the trends and strengths & weaknesses of the mobile phone experience currently.

Regards,

[Domain Jedi]

This has always been the case. However some sites dont automatically redirect, and will be www.domain.com/mobile while others will be www.domain.com/wap.

Since the public cant remember which is which .mobi is set to standardize the location of mobile sites.

Many .mobis will just redirect you to the existing www.domain.com/mobile site for companies that have the resources to do browser detection. But for others, now nobody has to remember all that extra crap.

<company name>.mobi is all you need, and you know you'll find a mobile site there.

What he said