We won’t start another war between S60 and OSX here. Everyone knows we are S60 fans, but we always like to look out of the box and take advantage of what’s there. The release of the iPhone pushed a lot of websites to release iPhone optimized versions that look better than the dull mobile sites and are more practical to read on smaller screens than full sites.
A while ago, I wrote about the iPhone optimized version of Google Reader which I still use despite Google releasing an S60 version. I always thought that I should look into more iphone sites, but never had the time until 2 days ago when Matthew Stevens wrote an article about iPhone sites on the Nokia Internet Tablet. Having a handy list of links, I was curious to see how they perform on the S60 browser. All of them rendered well except iPhlickr and Facebook, but I was most excited about the Weather Underground site which works like a charm.
This pushed me to further explore iPhone optimized websites, which led me discover a lot of top lists (see here, here and here) as well as some good gems like:
- Seeqpod : a music search and discovery engine, unfortunately only Popular Artists seem to work on my browser.
- iOlympics : news and schedules from the upcoming Olympics.
- AOL Food Recipe Find : just like the name says, this is a searchable detailed recipe guide.
- Dribbr : a directory of iPhone optimized websites, organized in categories.
Of course not all iphone optimized websites will render well on the S60 browser, but most of them will, so you should explore Dribbr or Apple’s own directory and see if there’s something there that strikes your interest. What do you think of these iPhone optimized sites? Do you like the way they look or perform, or do you prefer the usual mobile sites? Are there any other iPhone sites that you frequently use that you would advise us to explore?
[Bonus Link: on an iPhone related note, Jaganath from Digital Rover has posted a tutorial on how to add your MobileMe address to your S60 email client]
