Bookmarks for your portal

The portal cannot possibly aggregate all content from all web sites. If you visit certain sites often, you can put their URLs in the Bookmarks section of the portal. That saves you from entering the URLs on the phone keypad from time to time. It is a lot easier to manage the long URLs on a desktop computer via the portal's web interface than it is to deal with them on the phone.

Aggregated web content

The T-Mobile portal aggregates and displays the following web content on your phone browser:

• Movie listings and show times from your local theaters
• Your local weather forecast
• Quotes for stock and major fund prices
• Categorized news from various Internet sites
• Sports scores from your favorite teams
• Your daily horoscope
• Winning lottery numbers

The operator makes deals with the content providers so that you can view the information in the portal for free.

The Wireless Operator's Portal

Your wireless operator already has a portal for you! If you got your phone from the operator (or an authorized reseller), the portal's URL is probably already defined in the Bookmarks section of your Services browser. In this section, I'll use T-Mobile USA's T-Zones service as an example. Other operators' mobile portals are similar.

For most operators, you need to register an account on the operator's web site to personalize the portal content. The T-Mobile USA web site is http://www.t-mobile.com/. Your account is associated with your phone number. You can check your bills, minutes, and service subscriptions from the web site. Of course, you also can customize your portal via the web site. To get this customization page, click the T-Zones Settings link toward the top of the page after you log in.

From the web-management interface, you can even preview the portal configured for the mobile device.

Then, to access the T-Mobile portal from the phone's Services browser, enter the web address http://wap.myvoicestream.com/. On the phone browser, the portal page is divided into sections, and you can navigate through them via a series of menu-like links. Notice that the theaters listed on the mobile portal page are the same ones configured in the management interface.

A key benefit of using the wireless operator's portal is that your device is automatically logged into the account, without requiring you to type a user-name and password on the keypad. How does that work? Well, recall that your portal account is associated with your phone number. Since the wireless operator knows where a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) request originated (i.e., your phone number) at the WAP gateway, it can automatically log you into the portal.

Now, let's dig deeper into the content and services the T-Mobile portal offers. Other wireless operators have similar options.

The Mobile Web in Bite-Size Chunks

Mobile portals give you a launching-off point for your mobile web experience. But to make an intelligent choice of portals, you need to understand the core features and differences between portal services.

Accessing web sites directly via their URLs is OK if you have only a handful of web sites to visit. You can simply manage them in your browser's bookmarks and load each of them by hand. However, if you need to keep track of many web sites, managing and loading them individually is cumbersome. Here is where web portals come in handy.

Portals and search engines are among the most frequently visited web sites on the Internet. A portal provides a single point of entry to access a wide variety of information on the Web. In the desktop PC world, the portal is primarily a content aggregator to help users track the ever-changing Internet. In the world of the mobile Web, however, portals play a much more important role than they do on the desktop:

A mobile portal can aggregate content from regular, nonmobile Internet sources and present them in a format that is friendly to mobile browsers. For example, it can take a long story from the New York Times' HTML web site or a blogger's Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, break it into multiple smaller pages, and then feed it to the mobile browser as WML content.

A mobile portal saves you from having to remember and type multiple URLs and usernames/passwords on a small phone keypad.

With for-pay mobile content, a portal saves you the hassle of dealing with multiple content providers and billing services.

Most mobile web portals mobile portal solutions today are based on the concept of a "personalized portal." That is, first you register a personal account with the portal. Using a desktop PC, you can log into the portal's management interface and customize its contents. You specify what content your personal portal account will aggregate and display. Then, on the mobile phone, you see a personalized portal site that displays its contents according to your account settings. The separation between the management and view interfaces is a very smart design. You complete most of the interactions that require user input on the PC via the management interface. On your mobile device, you can stay in the comfortable "navigate and read" mode most of the time.

As you can imagine, the mobile portal is a great place to reach out to billions of mobile data users. So, many companies are in this space, competing for your business. In this hack, I'll introduce you to some of the most popular portals available via your Nokia phone.