Recently some newspapers and service providers have woken up and realized that some people use their mobiles for using the web (does the irony come thru....). To serve these customers, they are creating websites that are lighter, have less bling-bling and load faster. Some of current mobile sites or servies that I use:

m.google.com
mobile.yahoo.com
m.twitter.com
m.kauppalehti.fi
m.digitoday.fi
hs.fi/mobiili
wap.iltasanomat.fi
wap.iltalehti.fi
talouselama.fi/mobile

I don't immediately recall any .mobi services, apart from barcelona.mobi and helsinki.mobi, neither of which I've never used. Well, there's also nokia.mobi which I also never used. Entering .mobi into google search, the first few pages brings the mTLD related service sites, ICANN etc. on page 4 you start to see some service sites, like ericsson.mobi, foreca.mobi, weather.mobi, and the helsinki.mobi. One would expect that addresses like food.mobi, cars.mobi, hotels.mobi or travel.mobi would be in wide use (I did find iTravel.mobi for interstate highway travels), but no. Heck even sex.mobi is not in use! (or maybe I have a company filter that won't let me open it).

Why is .mobi not flying? I think it's a great way to inform the users that they are being provided with a website designed for use with mobiles. (except in cases of false advertisement, like this blog for example - but that's another story).

Of course many sites automatically recognise that the browser used is a mobile browser, but this is not bullet proof. For example, many popular US sites tailor their pages for iPhone, leaving all other phone models as either not serviced or with poorer rendering experience.

Jo Rabin, we need to do something!