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 collecting user data – asking users to enter a Name, Gender and City, before signing in.
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)
