Mobile Offerings Include PayPal, Wikis; New Freeware Site; UMPC Review

The universe of mobile sites continues to expand, so I thought this week we’d do an update on some of the offerings. Plus, we’ll note the first review of an Ultra Mobile PC, a new freeware site, and more.

PayPal Goes Mobile

It’s heartening each time a major player goes mobile, in this case PayPal, the foremost online payment system. In March PayPal quietly launched a version for mobile phone users. You first activate the mobile component by going to the PayPal Goes Mobile page to activate your phone and select a PIN. Then you can send money via text message or by calling an 800 number. 

Miki = Mobile Wiki

I like the cute designation that Socialtext has come up with for a mobile wiki: a miki. As you likely know, wikis are a convenient way to collaborate on a document online from within any browser, with the most famous being Wikipedia.

You have to set up an account to use Socialtext, but there’s a free plan for a wiki with up to five users. Once you set up a wiki, you can access it both via desktop computers and mobile devices. The Miki interface provides a way to access and edit Socialtext wikis via your device’s browser.

According to an article on PDAStreet, normally you would access your Socialtext wiki using a URL in the following format:
http://www.socialtext.net// where
is your Socialtext account name.

To access the Miki interface for a Socialtext wiki from your mobile browser, use the following URL:
http://www.socialtext.net/lite/page//

Other Recent Mobile Sites

Purelymobile is
a new Pocket PC-friendly directory that provides a searchable directory of the most popular and new
PDA sites in the UK and around the world. All sites are tested and approved before inclusion in the directory
in order to ensure a scroll-free browsing experience for users.

News4Mobile.com is another portal that I recently became aware of. Despite the “news” in the title, the categories go beyond news and include areas such as entertainment, knowledge search, and shopping. The site is engineered to be fast and responsive, and lets you sort the links in each category according to most viewed, most bookmarked, and newest additions. It also has a search feature for searching the
Web.

New Pocket PC Freeware Site

Freeware is always popular, and
Freeware for Windows Mobile Pocket PC is a new site that claims to have the largest listing, with some 5,700 titles. I thought that I saw demos among the listings, but the site’s owner says it’s all freeware and that the demo designation is a vestige of Handango’s former system of putting freeware under trial folders.

First Review of an Ultra-Mobile PC

PCW has one of the first reviews of the new Ultra-Mobile PCs. As you may recall from an earlier column, these
devices are about half way between the size of a Pocket PC and Tablet PC; they run a version of Wndows XP. This offering by Samsung is about to hit the market. The thorough review gives it a 4/5 rating and includes a gallery of pictures.

In Our Blogs

Werner has posted an extensive article that tells you everything you need to know about playing Flash content on your Pocket PC.

If you know of other great online resources, I invite you to post in our "What's Happening on the Web" forum or to contact me at Jim_Karpen@PocketPCmag.com.