A mobile version of Mint, the financial daily from HT Media, has gone live, accessible at http://m.livemint.com . Readers might remember that Mint had launched a limited mobile site around the Budget earlier this year; this time, they’ve launched a full fledged mobile site. The site gives access to three segments: News, Markets and Life. Now, Mobile usage is significantly different from Internet usage, and Mint Mobile gets a few things right:
- More scrolling with shallow links: Mint Mobile gives access to a lot of content on its homepage – Top Stories, News Segments, Stock Market udates at a glance, Corporate News, Views, Photo Gallery, Most Read, and a Poll. The markets page gives access to the Mark To Market segment, Financial Results and News. Thankfully, the Life segment, focused on lifestyle content, also includes Mints excellent blogs.
- Facilitating access to more content on each page — by giving access to the Next Story, Top Stories and Most Read on each page.
However, I didn’t quite like the idea of a marquee on a WAP site – who has the patience to wait for sentence to scroll across on a small mobile screen, particularly if it isn’t click-able? Top News serves that purpose. Another problem is that the content is without line-breaks, which becomes all the more unreadable on the smallest screen. It’s fine for a story that is 180-200 words, but for someone to read 687 words without a line-break or white space – it had better be worth the effort.
It’s nice to see a mobile site with images. However, if the pages take forever to load – which they can since GPRS is erratic and not really 256kbps – it may not work for many. We do love Google News for the mobile, yes?
I also noticed that there aren’t any ads yet on Mint Mobile, and it’ll be interesting to see how the structure will change once they enable advertisements. They are <b>collecting user data – asking users to enter a Name, Gender and City, before signing in.</b>
Note: You may also read MediaNama via mobile, by accessing the same URL – www.medianama.com – via your mobile phone.
[To view a presentation on designing for the Mobile Web, click more] (newsletter subscribers will have click here)
