To start off, I want to share my favorite air travel resource with you: http://flightstats.com.  I highly recommend bookmarking, memorizing and telling everyone about it.  I discovered this site when I used to travel every other week for my last job and had status on all the airlines (it sounds better than it really was).  FlightStats provides real-time information on flights and airports. And when I say real-time information, I mean real-time… typically if there was a flight delay, cancellation or gate-change, FlightStats showed the info approximately 5-20 minutes before the gate agent, airport screens or airline mobileSite showed any info.  It’s saved me a bunch of time and frustration while traveling.  Best of all, it works on any data-enabled phone without needing to download an app.

This summer I discovered one of my new favorite airline services – mobile boarding passes.  I heard and read about them a lot online but never tried it until this summer.  I am thoroughly impressed!  The process to get a mobile boarding pass is simple; check-in online and instead of printing your boarding pass, you can simply select to have it sent to your mobile device.  Instantly you receive an email or SMS from the airline with a web link that opens a page with a 2-D bar code (called a QR code).  Once at the airport, I simply put my phone with the QR code loaded on a scanner at the security check-point and at the gate.  It’s that simple.  Mobile boarding passes are not accepted at every airport but service is expanding.  So if you have the opportunity to use mobile boarding passes, I highly recommend it.

Finally, the last resources I want to share with you are the airline websites.  Most of the airlines now have mobileSites to give quick info on-the-go, so I did a quick review of the ones I traveled on this summer which consist of American, Continental, Delta, Southwest, United, and USAir.  I categorized each airline mobileSite as GOOD, AVERAGE, or FAIL:

GOOD airline mobileSites: These sites support automatic detection of mobile requests, mobile optimization based on handset, a non-cluttered home screen with quick links for critical mobile services such as check-in, flight status and reservation changes.  Delta and Southwest fit this category.

AVERAGE airline mobileSites: These sites support automatic detection of mobile requests, mobile optimization based on handset, but have a cluttered home screen with too many options that can slow down mobile users.  American fits this category.

FAIL airline mobileSites: These sites either do not support automatic detection of mobile requests or do not optimize based on handset.  Continental, United and USAir fit this category.  Continental’s mobileSite looked AVERAGE on my iPhone but when I loaded it on my BlackBerry it was unreadable.  United and USAir both loaded nicely on my BlackBerry and were GOOD but the site did not optimize for the iPhone and loaded the main website (way too busy for the iPhone’s small screen).

Airline travel these days leaves a lot to be desired with poor customer service, inflexible rules, flight delays and pricing.  I think airline mobileSites are making progress but also leave a lot to be desired.  I hope the airlines continue to invest in mobile technologies and find ways to use mobile to really engage their customers.

I hope this post helps you in your travels.  If you have other travel tips, secrets, sites or airlines to share with our readers, please leave a comment below.  Have a great long weekend!

For this mobile site review, I took a look at six sites that a person might pull-up to get real estate information: Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo! Real Estate, Coldwell Banker and Century 21. I wanted to see how easy the sites were to use, how quickly they loaded, how fast I could get information on properties and areas, and how the site looked in the mobile environment. I put the sites through a tough test using the BlackBerry Pearl, one of the more popular handsets on the market. The Pearl is very demanding given its small screen and rudimentary user interface.

Here is how the sites stacked up. I have rated them top to bottom in terms of overall performance.

1. Coldwell Banker (www.coldwellbanker.com)

Coldwell Banker does an excellent job with the interface on their mobilesite. It has autodetection for the mobile environment, and the user interface is very intuitive. The pages load very fast and makes performing searches a breeze. It was disappointed that the listings were limited primarily to Coldwell Banker (somewhat expected) and that the pictures for the listings do not display well. Given the performance of the other sites, these were minor issues.

2. Century 21 (www.century21.com)

Clearly, Century 21 and Coldwell Banker have decided to invest in making their websites mobile. Century 21 also employs auto detection for mobile and provides a streamlined interface for property searches. It is not as clean as Coldwell Banker, but still usable. They employ some color schemes that make the site hard to use, and like the Coldwell Banker site, it’s listings are pretty limited, displaying mostly Century 21 properties.

3. Zillow (www.zillow.com)

If you are looking to get property price estimates, then Zillow is the site to use. They feature their Zestimate tool on their mobile site, at the expense of property search. The Zestimate is very easy to use, just type in the address and the details come right up. I also like the fact you can toggle between their mobile site and actual website, a nice feature. In general, the site is hard to use and does not do search well. I wouldn’t recommend it for search, but at least they are making an attempt to give mobile users a way to access their site.

4. Yahoo! Real Estate (realestate.yahoo.com)

Well, the site works, but the first thing I noticed is that it is not optimized for mobile. Inherently, this makes the user interface very difficult to navigate and the page load speeds very slow. If you can get by that part, it offers a lot of the same search capabilities as the website, because it IS the website, just rendered on the phone. For my taste it’s too slow, but it gives reasonable results. If the site was optimized for the mobile environment, it would be a definite contender for the top spot.

5. Trulia (www.trulia.com)

Well, the search on Trulia works, so I can’t knock that part. On the other hand, the site is not optimized for mobile, so it is very difficult to navigate and do basic searches. Also, it is way too slow to be useful since it is loading way too much overhead from the website. It also needs to have javascript running, which is not enabled by default on the Pearl. Once you are able to navigate to the search, you get reasonable results and can access more details. Overall, not a great site for doing mobile real estate searches.

6. Realtor.com (www.realtor.com)

Well, I don’t even know where to begin. Even after enabling the javascript on the Pearl, the site still would not run saying javascript was not enabled. Therefore, I couldn’t get by that error message do try any searches. Clearly, the site is not optimized for mobile, and quite honestly, it is unusable.

Overall, I was less than impressed with mobile websites for real estate. I recognize that many of these same companies have also launched smartphone applications that are targeted for searching. However, not all people have a phone that supports applications, and not all people want to download applications to their mobile device. Given that searching for real estate always turns into a mobile experience at some point, I would have expected that these sites would have performed much beter in the mobile environment. The good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement, and I am sure that more sites will be become mobile friendly throughout the remainder of the year.

What has your mobile experience been searching real estate in the mobile environment? What features do you think would be most useful for search, and are there any sites (or apps) that you would recommend?

News sites provide a particular challenge for mobile as the content is constantly changing. Therefore, the mobile sites have to be refreshed regularly with the latest news and breaking stories. Having a site that updates occassionally, like once or twice a day, is not good enough. For this reason, many smaller, local news outlets are challenged to keep up a mobile site that provides a great user experience.

Since there are a lot of news sites out there, I decided to focus on the sites that provide more national/international coverage rather than the news sites that focus on local content, or provide a blend of content. The larger sites have the resources to provide a user experience tailored to the mobile environment.

I looked at six sites: CNN, Yahoo!, USA Today, Google, ABC News, BBC News. I rated each site based on its ability to optimize the view for the mobile environment, the speed at which the pages load, the usability of the site, the sites use of multimedia, the look and feel, and the content provided. Here is how I rated the sites:

1. CNN (www.cnn.com)

CNN does a very good job translating their web presence to the mobile environment. The site is easy to navigate with top stories and breaking news right at the top of the page. They also provide a nice blend of multimedia, incorporating both pictures and touches of video. Since the video is resource intensive, you have to click through to get it, but I appreciate the trade-off to keep from wasting system resources for videos that I am not interested in.

2. BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk)

This was a close call between BBC News and CNN. I liked CNN just a bit better due to the way they organized the content, both breaking news and sub-categories of news. Where BBC News excels is in the presentation of the content. It shows that BBC News has a more demanding mobile consumer in Europe who uses their phone for mobile access more frequently than US consumers. I would expect more US news sites to adopt a similar presentation style to BBC News as they evolve.

3. USA Today (www.usatoday.com)

USA Today has a good site, and one that I would not hesitate to use for news updates. Its site is mobile optimized, uses graphics effectively, and has good site organization. My primary disappointment with the site was the use of banner ads at the top of the page that utilized about a 1/3 of the precious screen resources on my old school Pearl.

4. ABC News (abcnews.com)

ABC news has a reasonable site that is mobile optimized, but its organization and usability did not match the first three. As with the USA Today site, it makes use of banner ads that eat precious screen real estate. Furthermore, the articles are fed in extremely small bite size pieces so you are contantly having to go to the next page to keep reading with no clue as to how many pages there are, and you are not given an option to see the entire article at one time. For these reasons, I cannot recommend using the site to get your news updates.

5. Google (news.google.com)

Google news is like typing “News” into the search box of Google. None of the content is orginal – it is just links to the most popular news articles at the major news outlets. Furthermore, a large excerpt for each article is presented on the front page which causes you to do a lot of scrolling. Instead of using Google, I would recommend just going to one of the major news sites listed above and cutting out the middle man.

6. Yahoo! (news.yahoo.com)

Unfortunately, Yahoo! just doesn’t seem to get the mobile game in the news category either. When I go to news.yahoo.com, it is not mobile optimized, so it is unusable on my Pearl. To get to the Yahoo! news site, I have to go to the Yahoo! home page, and then navigate to news. From there, I need to navigate to the category I want, and then click through to the scores. For my needs in the mobile environment, this does not satisfy my need to get a quick fix. Way too many clicks and way too much waiting.

I’m very curious as to your experience browsing new sites on the internet. Are there any local news sites you use that “get mobile” and provide a great user experience? If so, why? Feel free to leave a comment, and let me know if there are any sites out there that I may have missed that are doing a better job than those listed above, or ones that are a poster child for a mobile upgrade!

As a starter, using my Pearl to browse the internet is always a bit cumbersome. It has a small screen and does not have a lot of the browsing capabilities of high-end BlackBerry devices like the Curve, Bold or Storm, and is well short of the iPhone. So using the Pearl puts a lot of demand on having a site that is truly optimized for mobile use.

I wanted to try a range of sites, so I checked out four sites that are pretty popular for checking out sports information on the web: espn.com, cbssportsline.com, foxsports.com, and sports.yahoo.com. In order to determine which sites performed best in the mobile environment, I was interested in the following characteristics:

• Mobile detection: How easy could I get to the site. In other words, did the site automatically detect my device and format the site for me, or did I need to enter in a special site name or extension.
• Speed: How quickly did the site’s pages load.
• Usability: How quickly could I get to relevant information, such as sports scores or key headlines. As a mobile user, I am not necessarily interested in browsing a lot of articles, I just need to get a few quick score updates and maybe check out a quick headline or two.
• Multimedia: Does the site make appropriate use of pictures, graphics and multimedia features?
• Aesthetics: The overall look and feel of the site. This is the most subjective of the criteria.

Here is my take on how the sites stacked up, ranked in order from best to worst of the four:

1. espn.com

Maybe it’s because they know sports best, but I felt ESPN did the best job. First off, the site auto detects the mobile request and optimizes the view. There is no special url to enter or go to. The site’s pages load quickly, and the most relevant information was easy to get to and intuitive to find. The site uses minimal graphics and no video (at least on the Pearl), which is not a huge drawback since it keeps the load times down. Finally, the look and feel is very well done and fits well with their existing internet presence – you definitely know you are at the espn site.

2. foxsports.com

It was close between Fox Sports and ESPN, but Fox Sports came up just a bit short on the ease of use. Fox also uses auto-detection, but the page loads seemed to be just a bit on the slow side. Plus, finding the relevant information was not quite as intuitive as the ESPN site. One feature I did really like with the Fox Sports site was reading the articles. The articles are split across multiple pages using a “more” feature to go to the rest of the article. It also lets you know how many pages there are in the article so you can quickly decide if you want to continue reading or go somewhere else, which is a great feature for mobile usability.

3. cbssportsline.com

You can’t go wrong with any of the top three sites, as CBS Sportsline also does a good job with their mobile site. The site uses auto detection similar to the first two and has reasonable page load speeds. A very nice feature are the buttons at the top of the home page that take you right to the scores for the major sports leagues, as well as a drop down menu that lets you get to other sports quickly. For scores only, CBS Sportsline could be the best out there. The mobile site tries to make use of multimedia a bit too much in my opinion. They offer video options, but while I could see the video on the Pearl, I could not hear the audio. Without this issue, the CBS Sportsline site might have been a contender for the top spot.

4. sports.yahoo.com

Unfortunately, this site performed the worst of the four. First off, sports.yahoo.com did not have mobile detection on it, so you could only reach the Yahoo! sports page from Yahoo’s main mobile entry portal. Therefore, it took considerable time to find the sports page, and then multiple clicks to get to various pieces of information such as scores or headlines. On the plus side, the site does load quickly since it makes minimal use of any multimedia capabilities. In order to improve the mobile experience, sports.yahoo.com should use mobile detection, and the pages need to be streamlined so that users can get to information they want faster.

I am very curious as to the experience of other mobile internet users out there. Feel free to leave comments and let me know what mobile sports sites you have used, what your experience has been, and how you think they can be improved? I’d be especially interested in mobile sites I did not mention above. Also, be sure to note what type of mobile device you use as I am very interested in how the viewing experience differs based on device.

In the future, we will be looking at sites for news, weather, and finance. If there are any specific categories you think would be interesting to review, feel free to let us know that as well!