NYTimes Mobile Websites: A Review

A new Windows Mobile version of the New York Times site was launched last week. Previous mobile versions of the NYTimes have been been limited to text-only articles in a much smaller format. Moreover, the new NYTimes site will now allow visitors to browser or search articles from all sections of the paper.

For the record, here are some examples of what was previously available:

1) NYTIMES – by Unified Mobilty. This site runs advertisements and one can only access abstracts of articles. This site is a joke.

2) NYTimes – AvantGo – This was my previous goto for NYTimes headlines and it allowed one to browse the business section too. Decent, but primitive.

3) NY Times News River – This version is set up like an RSS feed of headlines from the times. It’s decent, but I still think the new Windows Mobile version is preferable.

Because the times was so slow to develop a decent mobile website, I’ve been getting most of my news from the BBC Online. This is one of the best mobile websites (from a design and access perspective) available. It is about time that the The New York Times has developed a decent, all inclusive, searchable, mobile portal with images too. I would not even mind seeing advertising on this site because I value their content very highly.

[tags] New York Times mobile, nytimes, nytimes.com, mobile websites, blackberry website, pda, mobile browser, marketing blogs, mobile advertising, marketing.fm [/tags]