Hack 51. The Mobile Web in Bite-Size Chunks

Mobile portals give you a launching-off point for your mobile web experience. But to make an intelligent choice of portals, you need to understand the core features and differences between portal services.

Accessing web sites directly via their URLs is OK if you have only a handful of web sites to visit. You can simply manage them in your browser's bookmarks and load each of them by hand. However, if you need to keep track of many web sites, managing and loading them individually is cumbersome. Here is where web portals come in handy.

Portals and search engines are among the most frequently visited web sites on the Internet. A portal provides a single point of entry to access a wide variety of information on the Web. In the desktop PC world, the portal is primarily a content aggregator to help users track the ever-changing Internet. In the world of the mobile Web, however, portals play a much more important role than they do on the desktop:

• A mobile portal can aggregate content from regular, nonmobile Internet sources and present them in a format that is friendly to mobile browsers. For example, it can take a long story from the New York Times' HTML web site or a blogger's Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, break it into multiple smaller pages, and then feed it to the mobile browser as WML content.

• A mobile portal saves you from having to remember and type multiple URLs and usernames/passwords on a small phone keypad.

• With for-pay mobile content, a portal saves you the hassle of dealing with multiple content providers and billing services.

Most mobile web portals mobile portal solutions today are based on the concept of a "personalized portal." That is, first you register a personal account with the portal. Using a desktop PC, you can log into the portal's management interface and customize its contents. You specify what content your personal portal account will aggregate and display. Then, on the mobile phone, you see a personalized portal site that displays its contents according to your account settings. The separation between the management and view interfaces is a very smart design. You complete most of the interactions that require user input on the PC via the management interface. On your mobile device, you can stay in the comfortable "navigate and read" mode most of the time.

As you can imagine, the mobile portal is a great place to reach out to billions of mobile data users. So, many companies are in this space, competing for your business. In this hack, I'll introduce you to some of the most popular portals available via your Nokia phone.

9.3.1. The Wireless Operator's Portal

Your wireless operator already has a portal for you! If you got your phone from the operator (or an authorized reseller), the portal's URL is probably already defined in the Bookmarks section of your Services browser. In this section, I'll use T-Mobile USA's T-Zones service as an example. Other operators' mobile portals are similar.

For most operators, you need to register an account on the operator's web site to personalize the portal content. The T-Mobile USA web site is http://www.t-mobile.com/. Your account is associated with your phone number. You can check your bills, minutes, and service subscriptions from the web site. Of course, you also can customize your portal via the web site (see Figure 9-10). To get this customization page, click the T-Zones Settings link toward the top of the page after you log in.

Figure 9-11 demonstrates how to make changes to the movie listing settings when you click the Customize button. From the web-management interface, you can even preview the portal configured for the mobile device (see Figure 9-12).

Then, to access the T-Mobile portal from the phone's Services browser, enter the web address http://wap.myvoicestream.com/. On the phone browser, the portal page is divided into sections, and you can navigate through them via a series of menu-like links. Figure 9-13 shows how to get to the local movie listings from the phone browser. Notice that the theaters listed on the mobile portal page are the same ones configured in the management interface (refer back to Figure 9-10).

Figure 9-10. The portal content settings in a T-Mobile account

A key benefit of using the wireless operator's portal is that your device is automatically logged into the account, without requiring you to type a user-name and password on the keypad. How does that work? Well, recall that your portal account is associated with your phone number. Since the wireless operator knows where a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) request originated (i.e., your phone number) at the WAP gateway, it can automatically log you into the portal.

Now, let's dig deeper into the content and services the T-Mobile portal offers. Other wireless operators have similar options.

9.3.1.1 Aggregated web content.

The T-Mobile portal aggregates and displays the following web content on your phone browser:

• Movie listings and show times from your local theaters

• Your local weather forecast

• Quotes for stock and major fund prices

  Figure 9-11. Making changes to the movie listing content setting

  
  
  

• Categorized news from various Internet sites

• Sports scores from your favorite teams

• Your daily horoscope

• Winning lottery numbers

The operator makes deals with the content providers so that you can view the information in the portal for free.

9.3.2. Bookmarks.

The portal cannot possibly aggregate all content from all web sites. If you visit certain sites often, you can put their URLs in the Bookmarks section of the portal. That saves you from entering the URLs on the phone keypad from time to time. It is a lot easier to manage the long URLs on a desktop computer via the portal's web interface than it is to deal with them on the phone. Figure 9-14 shows how to manage the bookmarks on the T-Mobile web portal, and Figure 9-15 shows the bookmarks displayed on the phone browser.

9.3.2.1 Mobile content download.

The portal provides downloadable content, such as wallpapers, screensavers, ring tones, themes, and Java games, specially tailored to your phone. You typically need to pay for each download. Most operator portals support "one-click-shopping." In this case, the purchase is automatically billed to your monthly phone service bill. There is no need to enter credit card and payment information on the small phone keypad. This integrated billing is one of the big advantages of operator portals compared with other types of portals (discussed later in this hack). Figure 9-16 shows the process for buying a ring tone and billing it to your phone bill.

Figure 9-12. Previewing the customized portal contents from the web site on a desktop browser

You can also purchase mobile content from the desktop PC browser and then download them to the PC. "Customize the Idle Screen" [Hack #46], "Customize Ring Tones" [Hack #45], and "Run Java Applications" [Hack #16] cover how to install wallpaper, ring tones, and Java applications, respectively, from a PC to a phone.

Figure 9-13. Finding a movie through the T-Mobile portal

9.3.2.2 The operator-assisted services.

Operator-assisted services are very useful for mobile phone users. They let the operator search for information you're interested in and give the results to you via voice. For instance, if you are in a big city looking for a restaurant you know only by name, it would be impossible to search for it on your mobile phone while you are navigating the busy streets. It would be nice to have an operator look it up for you and give you driving directions over the phone.

The operator-assisted services usually cost you between $1 and $2 per minute.

The operator-assisted services are also known as 411 services, since you typically dial 411 or similar service numbers on your mobile phone to reach the operator. As the range and the popularity of the services grow, other convenience numbers are also being provided for faster and more direct access to specific services. For instance, you might dial different numbers to have the operator search for a local person or a local business. The wireless opera-tor's portal site often lists those service numbers and their per-minute charge rates. From the convenience of your Services browser, you can click one button to make the call and have it billed to your monthly bill (see Figure 9-17). I discuss how to make calls from a web page in more detail in "Make Phone Calls from Web Pages" [Hack #54].

Figure 9-14. Adding a bookmark via the web account

Figure 9-15. The bookmarks on the phone browser

Figure 9-16. Downloading and buying a ring tone from the portal

Figure 9-17. Making operator-assisted calls via the portal

9.3.2.3 Email, alerts, and instant messaging.

In addition to delivering content accessible via mobile and desktop web browsers, portals also provide a variety of messaging services to the phone (I cover the details of those services in other hacks):

• You can access existing email accounts from your phone browser via the portal [Hack #60].

• You can configure the portal to send alerts (e.g., birthday reminders and news headlines) via Short Message Service (SMS) messages [Hack #64].

• You can interact with popular instant messaging systems via the portal [Hack #66].

• You can send new contact and calendar items from the portal to the phone via messages [Hack #34].

Most operators charge for each SMS message sent and received on your phone. If you use those messaging services frequently, the SMS messaging cost can add up. I recommend you check your operator's special rate plans for frequent SMS users.

9.3.3. Third-Party Portals

The wireless operator's portal is a free service to subscribers, and it integrates very well with your phone and service plan. You should take advantage of it. However, if you switch to another operator sometime in the future, you will probably lose all your personalized settings and customizations in the portal. Also, if you use a prepaid access card, you probably do not have access to the operator's portal at all.

To avoid operator lock-in, you can use one of the third-party mobile providers, such as Yahoo! Mobile, MSN Mobile, or AOL MyMobile. They offer the same types of services as the wireless operator's portals, with the addition of some premier content such as news analysis, driving directions, and Yellow Pages listings. Table 9-1 lists the URLs for the mobile sites and desktop management interfaces for those portals.

Table 9-1. Third-party mobile web portals

Name	Mobile URL	Portal management URL
Yahoo! Mobile	mobile.yahoo.com	www.yahoo.com
MSN Mobile	mobile.msn.com	www.msn.com
AOL MyMobile	mymobile.aol.com	www.aol.com

If you are already a Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL user, you can carry your existing desktop portal settings over to your phone. The third-party portals provide better integration with their respective email and instant messaging services. Since the third-party portals cannot securely identify your mobile phone browser by its phone number, you have to sign in from your phone to use them.

9.3.4. Custom Portals

All the portals I discussed so far allow you to choose content from their predefined pools of resources (a.k.a. their walled gardens). You cannot add more information sources, such as alternative news and real-time stock quotes, to those portals. The best you can do is to add a bookmark, which is inadequate in many cases. Some web sites allow you to build your own portals from a larger variety of content sources. Here are two examples:

WINKsite (http://www.winksite.com/)

Specializes in syndicated content from news and blog sites. You can set up a personal WINKsite portal and aggregate third-party content to your personal portal page. You can also use WINKsite to run surveys, chat rooms, and forums from your mobile portal page. Figure 9-18 shows how to configure your own WINKsite portal. I discuss how to use WINKsite to access blogs via your mobile phone in more detail in "Read Blogs and RSS Feeds" [Hack #55].

Figure 9-18. Configuring the WINKsite portal

Moreover (http://www.moreover.com/)

Provides a large pool of major news organizations (e.g., the New York Times and CNN), online news sites (e.g., CNET and Salon), and regional news sources (e.g., major local newspapers and TV stations). It monitors business news, press releases, research reports, blogs, and even discussion boards. You can purchase and aggregate any of these on your portal.

Of course, you can always build your own mobile portal site from scratch if none of the existing ones satisfies your needs. Check out "Create a Mobile Web Site" [Hack #53] for more details.