MSN Mobile Portal is certainly new, but is it improved?
Rating: waffle
Phil Holden Microsoft’s Director says, “We firmly believe there is an inflection point here. There is a new battle, a new frontline developing on the mobile phone”.
With talk such as this I turned on and tuned in my Nokia 6680 to http://mobile.msn.com. I was excited and expected a lot. What I saw was a standard mobile portal branded in the classic MSN blue with the biggest monster sized search box at the top sandwiched in-between two blue banners. There was no advertising.
Disappointed? You bet!
The fact that there was no advertising was supposed to be a “plan” by Microsoft to introduce it slowly. I am sure in true terms it means that it didn’t have any out of house advertising to put on the site at start because MSN and advertising usually go hand and hand.
Another thing that struck us as odd was in the vertical search links
1. Hotmail
2. Messenger
3. MSNBC News
4. FOX Sports
5. Entertainment
6. All
When you click all you get to another three tiered list of links and one of them is Web Search?
For a company that has strived hard to create a made for mobile portal that can’t be viewed online and is rendered for specific mobile devices – what is Web Search about. What happened to all the other search boxes and criteria that MSN or Microsoft boasts such as windows or live! search? Excuse us if Microsoft has trademarked the name Web Search and we simply don’t know about it… but such a generic name does little for brand identity. If does even less for consistancy and Web Search doesn’t sound like a made for mobile search either.
So I did a search for BKI Media and it came up with 250+ results and then a search for Bena Roberts (myself) where msearchblog and GoMo News came up near the top. Then I clicked on GoMo News and only the last column rendered so its showed the people from MyBloglog before any of the news articles! (**If you would like to see GoMo on mobile the best is via Feed to Mobile see the barcode on the right handside of the blog or at www.wapple.net/gomo** ) But I shouldn’t really complain as last time I tried to view GoMo News on Vodafone with the Novarra browser it said “website is too big” – something is better than nothing.
For more information on the new portal and for analysis on MSN or Windows Mobile please see The Mobile Search Analyst.
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