Mobileplay is an ad-supported service designed for users that want an enhanced web browsing experience. Mobileplay allows users to instantly display websites that are correctly formatted for their phone, bypass download times, browse with the touch of a button (eliminating typing in those long URLs) and more. Interested? Than you’ll be more than happy to know that MobilePlay is also completely free. Basically, Mobileplay provides content to your phone by downloading it from channels that the service provides. The general categories of the channels include news, entertainment, media, weather, sports and trivia. Specifically, MobilePlay offers content from Gizmodo, Gawker, Valleywag, PC World, Business Week, Associated Press, USA TODAY, SportingNews, Astrology.com, Salon.com, WiredNews and more. Read on to find out more!
After spending a bit of time running through all of Mobileplay’s features on a Palm Treo 650, I was surprised as to how easy the interface was to navigate through. Not only that, but everything on MobilePlay is focused on single button commands, so even when accessing the services’ different features, you won’t find any load times. Since the service is ad-supported, you do get pop-ups every now and then while you’re switching channels or trying to access a different feature, but you can quickly bypass the ad with the touch of a button. Like I mentioned before, everything on MobilePlay is instantaneous, so the pop-up ads don’t really annoy you the way you think they would. On top of being able to browse content quickly, everything is also easy to read – as all of the content on MobilePlay is formatted to fit the screen of the phone you are using. You’ll still have to scroll up and down (duh), but I found no instances where I had to perform the annoying side-to-side scroll.
Mobileplay also allows you to save specific articles and quickly access your email list to share them with someone. You can also send invites to join Mobileplay the same way. If you manage to get all your friends using Mobileplay, there is also a buddy list feature that makes it a little bit easier to share content with them. You’ve also got some fun things like general or sci-fi trivia if you find yourself wanting to kill some time. The one thing holding back Mobileplay is the limited amount of content it offers. The service is new, though, so maybe in the future (with enough sponsor support) MobilePlay will provide more content from the web at our fingertips. When it comes down to it, Mobileplay is an easy to use, fun and free service that really doesn’t face any major problems, and if you can live with the limited content it offers, you’ll find yourself in an enjoyable browsing experience.
MobilePlay [product page]