After hearing MSNBC mobile went ad-supported, I wanted to check it out for myself. So I set about installing it on my Verizon XV6700.
MSNBC “did the right thing” for the install process. Entering your phone number on the web sends you a text message with a download link. It’s sad that I even have to mention this, but it just makes me happy when carrier-agnostic software is drop dead easy to install.
That said, PocketPC’s have had that kind of install experience for years, with sites like Handango driving it. However, ad-supported content puts another level of ease on top of it, because there’s no billing or personal information to enter. It’s just install and go.
One gotcha though. My default browser is set to the Opera Beta, so its user-agent string wasn’t registered with MSNBC. Just had to copy and paste the URL to PIE to fix that.
I installed it to my SD card and fired it up. To my surprise, it has an autoupdate feature which triggered as soon as it started! This isn’t the cheap kind either – where it links you to another download. Nope, this is in-place software replacement with no restart. Not bad MSNBC. Not bad.
I then got the top menu:
I selected “news” then “headlines” from this and the badness started. I got this screen:
My signal was at two bars – and I thought it managed to get its own update. So I killed the program and turned on my WiFi connection to see if that would help. No go.
So I did the old Windows standard – blew on the cartridge. No wait. That’s Nintendo.
I rebooted the device.
Bingo!
Here’s a shot reading the news.
I was underwhelmed. I could do this on the web. There was a neat SMS button that would let you send articles to others. But that’s not compelling enough to get me excited. So lets get to the real meat – the video.
First nice touch: bandwidth adjustment. I turned off WiFi and left it on high. I wanted to see this thing in real use away from home.
It shelled out to Windows Media Player. The video was about 40 seconds long and had no prepended or postpended ad. I’m sure that will come later. The video looked great, but my screenshot software couldn’t get a full screen capture. So here’s one in normal mode:
At this point, nothing had been done with the application that couldn’t have been done on a WAP site.
Finally, the week in pictures. Nothing interesting. It’s just articles arranged in a slideshow with a picture and text in each one.
So there you have it. But did you notice something strange? I never mentioned seeing an ad! That’s because I thought I didn’t. However, looking more closely, I started thinking that the green Windows Mobile strip that you can see in those screenshots is actually an ad. So I clicked on it and….
Bingo. Full screen ad. Now I have to say, this is the way to do ads. If you put something in that space that tells you to click it and is attention-grabbing – that’s being non-intrusive while getting the message across. That’s how it should be done.
As for the software itself. Meh. It’s a web site in a program. Maybe they’ll do more with it to make it worth installing.
This seems to be only for PocketPC’s now, but if you would like to try the service yourself, go to this link on your desktop.
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Comment by sherena 02.07.08 @ 12:44 pmLeave a comment
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