Wap Review

Excellent US-centric sports site. In depth coverage of all major and many minor sports.

Sports coverage with a British Bent. Well-writen, in-depth stories in the best BBC tradition. The PDA edition of BBC Sport has pages averaging 25 KB of text with images 202 px wide. Works well with PDA's, Smartphones and Opera Mini

The BBC's outstanding sports coverage in light weight wml format. Pages average 2KB with 66px wide images making this site ideal for users on slow or expensive networks.

cbsSportsline.com: has a new mobile url (cbs.volantis.net/sportsline/) and a new and very attractive site design. The old site was text only, the new one has images resized to browser widths and flashy image gradients. Content's not bad either.

Another good general sports news site with extensive coverage of college and profession team sports, tennis, horse racing, motor sports, golf and more.

ESPN is one of the four TV networks that share the rights to broadcast NFL games. Their web site lets fans follow, in real time, any one of the 14 NFL games typically played on Sunday or the single Monday night game. The WAP site delivers almost all the same information. in a very effective and elegant way. BTW, I'm focusing on the ESPN's NFL coverage but ESPN's Web and WAP sites also cover all the major and many of the minor sports. There is live coverage of baseball and basketball but the NFL coverage is the most detailed.

When you visit the ESPN site, the first thing you see is a list of sports. After you choose NFL and then scores from the front page, you see a list of this weeks games with the scores. Scores of games that are finished are marked with an "F" and clicking on them will lead to a typical after game description of how the game unfolded. But selecting a game in progress brings up the screen show in the first image. Here on a single screen, you can see the score, how much time is left, the down, the position of the ball, which team has procession and the outcome of the last play. These are the essential elements that a football fan needs to follow the game. Note that below the critical time-sensitive information is a refresh link. The page doesn't refresh itself presumably out of consideration for those of us on metered data plans. Scrolling "below the fold" will reveal secondary information such as game statistics and links to the pre-game story and a page detailing the scoring plays of the current game (second image).

The ESPN WAP site is certainly not flashy, no images, streaming video or audio. All of those would be nice and I'm sure we will see them when 3G is the norm. The cool thing about this site is it works right now on any WAP enabled phone. It comes in both WAP1 and WAP2 flavors and loads fast. I see sites like this one which are designed for usability with no learning curve and compatibility with all phones to be what will drive initial mass acceptance of mobile browsing. We need to get more users hooked on the mobile web, too many of the current sites are difficult to navigate, prone to throwing errors or require extra steps like signing up on the web, entering passwords or drilling down through endless screens and links to find the little bit of useful information. Badly designed sites make users question the utility of the mobile web. A few bad experiences - maybe only one - will discourage many forever from trying to use the web on their phones.

Time Warner's weekly print sport magazine, Sports Illustrated (SI), finally has a mobile web site of its own. For the last few years, Sports Illustrated content has appeared as a section within CNN Mobile (Time Warner also owns CNN) but now it has its own URL m.si.com. The site covers news from MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, NASCAR, Professional Soccer, Golf, Tennis, Cyling, College Football and Basketball and even occasional coverage of high school sports.

SI's numerous writers and columnists are also featured with in-depth articles and opinion pieces. There's live coverage of Major Leage Baseball, National Football Leage and National Basketball Association games. The live coverage is not play by play but incudes frequently updated box scores, a summary of scoring plays and statistics.

Eurosport (m.eurosport.com) Eurosport Mobile has a new url and a redesigned and much improved site. The front page has been expanded from 5 headlines with daily updates to 10 headlines updated every few minutes and finally there is LIVE coverage, lots of it. At this moment there are live reports from 7 football (soccer to us Yanks) matches, 4 snooker! matches, 2 tennis matches and 2 basketball games. Besides those sports, Eurosport also has extensive coverage of Motor Sports, Cycling, Cricket, Track and Field and Rugby.

The Hockey News, largest selling print hockey publication in North American, offers this mobile site created and hosted at FeedM8. THE mobile destination for the nockey fan, the site has scores, stories from the magazine, and columns and blogs by THN's reporters.

An active sports magazine for young women. Covers skiing, snowboarding, cycling, roller blading, skateboarding, rock climbing, mountain boarding and other outdoor adventure sports.

shralp.com is a one year old snowboarding video blog (vlog) site. Shralp releases a new video every Sunday. You can view the videos in your browser on the Shalp! PC site. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the videos. These are not your typical YouTube amateur videos. Production values are high and the images visually exciting.

Shralp seems to "get" the potential of mobile video too. Right from the beginning, Shralp! has had a companion mobile web site and has offered mobile formatted videos for download on their main site. The mobile formats are .mp4 averaging 9 to 14 MB and 176x144 .3gp running from 2 to 3 MB. There are also higher quality formats for iPod, Zune and other media players.

Shralp's mobile site at shralp.com/mobile offers all 41 of the .3gp formatted Shralp vodcasts. Two or three megabytes is a large file for .3gp. Be sure to head the warning on Shralp's mobile site,

Sideloading is a good alternative if your are on a metered plan or you have a carrier like Verizon that blocks it customers from streaming or downloading off-portal videos.

Onboard covers the sport of snowboarding with images, news, results and event listings from the world of competitive snowboarding.

Skateboarding magazine with interviews of top skaters, event calendars and result, news and gossip.

CricketFan.mobi () News blog covering the game of cricket. It's a mashup of headline feeds from cricket sites with links back to the full stories mobilized by Google.

Owned by ESPN, U.K. based Cricinfo is the largest cricket sports site on the web and probably on the mobile web as well. Truly international in scope, the site covers all levels of the sport with live scores, results, schedules, news, photos and statistics on over 48,000 player profiles.

Soccerway (soccerway.mobi) is a big soccer (football) site covering the sport from around the world with real time scores, news and statistics. This is a "one size fits all" mobile site, but unfortunately some of the pages are a little too big (2o KB text plus 13 KB of images) to load on all phones.

A new mobile soccer site with frequently updated football news (about 50 posts a day), standings and live scores. It's published in 15 different languages.

Euro2008info (euro2008info.mobi) News, Scores, Schedules and Standings from the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship.

Scores, schedules, interviews and articles from the world of professional golf.

Tiger Woods has a mobile site. Follow the worlds best golfer around the world and around the course with the latest golf news, schedules, scorecards and photos.

There is some great baseball coverage on the mobile web. If you can't be near a radio or TV you can still follow the games play by play and pitch by pitch with the mobile web on your phone. ESPN (mobile.espn.com) does a good job with baseball, very similar to their NFL live coverage that I raved about last year. But I think MLB.com's live coverage (wap.mlb.com) is even better than ESPN's A unique feature of the MLB site is a pitch by pitch graphic. The image should give you a good idea of how it looks. The site also has game photos, box scores, a running play by play narrative and lots of statistics to settle those bar bets. This is a very well done mobile site that's easy to navigate with access key accelerators (press 1 to refresh, for example). Page and image sizes are reasonable so the screens load quickly

MLB.com has really embraced mobile of late. In addition to the mobile web coverage you can sign to receive text alerts during the game. MLB's mobile web and SMS alerts are free - other than your carrier's normal fees for data traffic and receiving text messages. There are a couple of premium services. For $5.99 for the month, Sprint customers can get live audio reports from all the games. Verizon EVDO and Amp'd customers can watch video highlights of all the games and live game coverage of the World Series. Amp'd which is a new MVNO using Verzion's EVDO/1-RTT network charges customers 49 cents per game plus 30 cents per MB for data transfer or $10/mo for unlimited data. Verizon customers pay 99 cents per game and also need a $15/month V-Cast subscription which includes unlimited data. You can find details about all of MLB's mobile offerings here.

This popular blog covering the Boston Red Sox MLB team detects mobile browsers and delivers a mobile formated edition them.

Major league Baseball news algorithmically selected from the web. Caution, links directly to non-mobile content!

Well written articles on mostly British sports including cricket and rugby. Also, good Formula One coverage

A rather weak sports site. Only covers major US sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, PGA, College football and hoops and professional tennis. Each section has scores and just 3 stories. No photos.

Update 7-Jul-2007: The site has been completely redesigned and now has images, coverage of more sports and more and longer stories.

Mobile site of The Sporting News, a weekly print sports magazine. Comprehensive coverage of mainstream US sports ( MLB | NCAA Basketball, NCAA Football, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, NHL).

Full test of articles from the sports section of the Washington Times newspaper

Surfing forcasts for major surf breaks around the world.

Wave and weather information for California Surfers. Detailed weather surfing forecasts with tides, wave heights, wind and weather for major Northern and Southern California surfing locations.

Mobile site from the magazine of the same name. The attractively designed site features surfing news, event listings, interviews and free downloadable surf theme wallpapers. The site was created by Amsterdam based Mowave which according to their website has created mobile sites and services for quite a few magazines including Maxim and Stuff and for the TV series Family Guy. No url's so I have some digging to do.

Mobile magazine covering sports and the game of Poker. Poker playing tips and coverage of World Series of Poker profession matches. Also sports features currently covering Cricket and Football or Soccer as it's called in the US.

Complete coverage of National Football League, news, scores and team rosters.

Excellent NFL coverage from MSNBC. Game recaps and predictions, player bios and interviews. Most stories have photos.

NFL on Plusmo (sports.plusmo.com/nfl/wap/boxscore) which started out as a mobile widget platform, has expanded their focus to include the mobile web. This site, which unlike the rest of Plusmo requires no registration, which offers NFL (American Professional Football) scores, live play by play reports, stats and news. Plusmo's also added a mobile web interface to their widgets at plusmo.com/wap (free registration required).

PackersnewsThe Green Bay Packers are the winningest team in NFL history with 12 championships. They are also the only non-profit, community-owned professional sports franchise in the USA. The Packers have a huge fan base that extends far beyond the borders of Green Bay, a small city (pop 100,000 ) in northern Wisconsin. The Green Bay Press Gazette, a local daily paper, hosts Packersnews.com, the ultimate Packer' fan site. Starting with this season there is also a mobile edition of Packersnews (m.packersnews.com) with a selection of top stories and photos from the PC website. There's a lot of Packer lore on the site but as a mobile site it's rather uneven. About half the content is formatted for mobile but many links lead to pages on the full site that are too large to load on most phones.

NBC Sports (mobile.nbcsports.com) "Sports" is kind of a misnomer for this site. As of this writing in October, 2006 NBC Sports Mobile is covering only one sport - NFL Football. Last week's baseball World Series was never mentioned on NBC Sports Mobile! Not that it's a bad football site - for pigskin fans the site is very good with lots of game photos, scores, player stats, week by week schedules, game recaps, injury lists and news and features about notable players. The one thing that is lacking is live play-by-play or even scores for games in progress, but for that there is always ESPN Mobile (review). I wonder what they'll do when football season ends, switch to covering the NBA perhaps.

The NBA (National Basketball Association) season started Nov 1st. NBA.com has a mobile site at nba.mobi that lets you follow the games on the mobile web. It's an OK site but I was hoping for a little more. NBA.com Mobile has league news, scores, schedules and statistics. The news items are mostly post-game wrap ups and are pretty short - just a sentence or two. The scores page lists all of today's games with current scores, quarter and minutes to play. It lets you see how all the games are going at a glance but there is no way to drill down into a game and see the full box score and scoring leaders like you can on ESPN Mobile (mobileapp.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/xhtml/) or Fox Sports Mobile (fs.sorrent.com/fs/fe). NBA.com's statistics list the top 5 players across both conferences in points, assists and rebounds. Mobile ESPN has a lot more, the top twenty in each conference in points, assists, rebounds, steals, blocks, field goal percentage, free throw percentage and 3 point percentage. ESPN also has statistics on every player in the NBA as part of it's team specific pages. There's little reason to bother with NBA.com's mobile site as ESPN.com has everything on the NBA site and a much more.

The Women's National Basketball Association's mobile site. The site offers scores, news, statistics, photos and schedules from the professional hoops league.

MSNBC's National Basketball Association coverage. Typically includes around a dozen stories with photos.

A basketball fan named Ross has created a fun NBA mobile page called All-Time NBA Top 50 (home.swbell.net/hartley4/pocketnba.htm). Basically it's an exhaustive list of the top 50 players all-time in a number of categories including points, rebounds, shots blocked, games played and about 15 more. There are also a couple of interesting articles by Ross on the site, one on how the 1998 strike keep some players from topping the record books and the other on the chances that anyone will ever break several notable records like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,387 points or Wilt Chamberlain's 23,924 rebounds. If you're into bucket ball statistics, this is a fascinating mobile site.

Good coverage of college hoops from MSNBC.

British based site covers Soccer, Rugby, Cricket, Golf, Track and Field, Tennis, Snooker and Forumula One.

Covers all the professional sports with odds and online pools.