Note: I had this on my
blog and thought it would be nice to share with yours.
Nokia has sold more than 2 million units of its Nokia 6600 Symbian smartphone in the last couple of months. Together with the previous best seller (Nokia 3650) as well as 7 models from other vendors, there are more than 10 million Symbian smartphone users out there. If you count lower end smartphones (e.g., Nokia Series 40 phones), the number easily exceeds 100 million. Are you one of them? As a bartender at JavaRanch's J2ME forum, I want to find ways for millions of smartphone users to access JavaRanch more easily. Here are some tips:
First, you can always set the moose as your home screen to show your loyalty.
Or, you can read latest news from
JavaRanch Radio (the blog) using a mobile RSS reader such as the J2ME based
mReader from Mark Allanson. It even allows you to read blog entries offline.
Of course, you can visit the
saloon itself using a xHTML compatible mobile browser such as
Opera. The Opera browser is installed on all new Nokia 6600 devices. For Nokia 3650 users, you have to install your own and it costs you $29 after 14 days. My experience with Opera on Nokia 3650 has been mixed -- it requires 2.4 MB just to run and could be slow sometimes.
If you do not have Opera or only have a WML phone, you can use Google's WML service at
http://www.google.com/wml to convert any HTML page to WML pages. It parses the HTML page, strips out all images and then sends back the text in multiple small pages. This is not the best way to read long pages but hey, it would work on any of the "free" phones when you sign up services.
The example below shows our bartender Lasse Koskela in action.