Blue Chi’s

The Times of Oman and Al Shabeeba newspapers launched their mobile phone portals yesterday, it is the first news mobile portal that we have in Oman.

I personally do not think that such mobile portals are as important these days because of RSS. I was already checking news headlines for months and months over my mobile phone via RSS. It is easier to track and to use – in theory at least, but in practice, the RSS feed of Times of Oman is very buggy, the same news item pop up twice every day, the first time is the right one when the news comes up, but the second time they just show up with dead links that do not lead anywhere. It is very annoying, but it works.

I has always been very much irritated by the Times of Oman RSS feed because they are partial. Many people think that partial RSS feeds are pointless. Because of the variety of RSS readers, there is a great chance that I will not be able to click on the read-link, and that is what happens when I am using my mobile reader. I understand that the Times of Oman wants people to visit their page so that they can put advertisements on them, but number 1, it is not working, and number 2, they can just put the advertisement in the freaking RSS feed itself!

Back to topic, I think that the web based portal of Times of Oman is not too bad, but I think that it is way too cluttered, people visit Times of Oman to check the news, not search for restaurants or check their horoscope. It takes forever to actually find and read a news item on this mobile portal.

I do not think that any of the graphics on the Times of Oman mobile portal are necessary whatsoever. I obviously KNOW that I am checking the wap portal for the newspaper, what matters is the Times of Oman brand, not the word MOBILE or the MOBILE LOGO. I also think that the HTML code is ineffective, there is no need for font tags on mobile phones, mobile phones do not usually have the same fonts as computers anyway.

I do not think that I will be visiting the Times of Oman wap portal anytime because I just do not visit websites anymore, I read RSS. I hate their partial fade, and obviously there won’t be an integration between it and the mobile portal. I think that the Times of Oman would offer its readers a better service if they simply made their RSS full and put advertisements on these.

Here is an exclusive to the readers of my blog, we are launching a new project called ‘Chemical Orange’ tomorrow at KOM’s eGames conference. Chemical Orange is a portal for downloading free mobile phone games. The slogan of Chemical Orange is “Fun, Fresh Gameplay” and that is exactly what it’s about. Our games are very *ethnic*, simple and addictive. We have two games at the launch and they are compatible with a large number of phones (all Nokia N-Series and E-Series all other phones running the Flash Lite Player). Our games are free of charge, but you might need to pay for using data on your phone, however, our games are about 50KB to 80KB in size, so that is about 40 to 25 baisa if you are on Oman Mobile’s postpaid. You can also download the games onto your computer and then transfer them to your phone if you don’t want to use the mobile portal.

To access the mobile portal, open your phone browser and access m.chemicalorange.com. Our actual website can be found at http://www.chemicalorange.com/

I am also going to speak tomorrow at eGames conference, hope to speak to some of you attending the event tomorrow!

For those of us who consume the internet on the go, the latest version of Opera Mini is officially out now. I have been using a the built-in Nokia mobile browser for a while and I generally thought that it is very good. The only problem I have with it is the fact that you cannot change the screen orientation, my screen is tall and thin so reading on it would be easier if I can rotate it, and this is possible to do using the Opera Mini browser. The new browser also uses the same rendering engine as the full version of Opera, so it should be able display virtually all web pages. (Other than those which are not compatible with the full version of Opera to start with! Such as Google Notebook and other Google products.)

I noted that this browser is a bit faster than the built-in Nokia browser when it comes to rendering.

You can download Opera Mini for free from http://www.operamini.com/.