eBuddy is the latest in a series of reviews on mobile chat applications. We felt that this was one of the most exciting frontiers in the mobile space.

What is great about eBuddy is that it isn’t only mobile.. it is also web. Right from the home page though the mobile aspect is put forward. What is even cooler is from the mobile page you can chose two options : 1) to download a java version or 2) to use a browsing version.

Most users will obviously opt for the browsing choice to get to know better the service and whether or not it is any good. If you opt for the browsing you can always change and and download the java version. In fact on the mobile home page the java version is always promoted.

What is great and gives this service an edge of their competitors for the minds and hearts of users is that right from the start you can choose your language. And what a selection of languages they :

Then you can go about configuring your eBuddy, firstly by choosing the networks like MSN Live, Gmail, Yahoo Messenger, etc.. Like Heysan and the web competitors such as Trillian (which by the way now has a beta for iPhone) you can add several types of chat networks visible from one interface. This is extremely practical because if you have a bunch of contacts from different chat networks they are all visible in one place and all on your mobile!

Then you login :

And Voila you have all your contacts on MSN :

Or on GTalk :

And then basically it is easy as that you start chatting.

So what are my conclusions ? Well frankly eBuddy in browsing mode is obviously less ergonomic than in Java mode but it is the best possible solution if you don’t want to download or if you have an exotic phone that doesn’t have its Java version of eBuddy. Of what I have tested so far eBuddy is the best. Not by a lot compared to Heysan.. but you can tell that there is a larger more mature team behind their service.

Eva de Mel on MobilOpen

The html input tag is what’s used to display a text box on a Web page. Input has an optional type parameter. Specifying type=”password” causes characters to be masked, asterisk is displayed instead of the character typed. It’s standard practice on the “big” web to to use type=”password” on any field where the user enters a password or PIN.

This practice has been carried over to the mobile Web were I think it hurts usability while doing little or nothing to enhance security.

Of course, security on the web is real concern. Phishing and identity theft are constantly in the news. For eCommerce and banking sites I’m willing to put up with a little inconvenience in the name of security. But does masking the password of, say, an online RSS reader really make us any safer? What’s the worst that can happen, someone marking all our feeds as read?

Phones have small screens and correspondingly small fonts. It’s hard to read a mobile screen from a distance of more than a couple of feet. If your worried about password theft, you can usually turn away from onlookers or shield the screen with your hand while entering your password. I think there is a far greater likelihood of a bad guy stealing you password by watching which keys you are pressing than by reading the screen.

Mobiles generally show you the actual character for a fraction of a second before it changes to an asterisk but It’s still hard to accurately triple tap passwords on a phone. It’s especially difficult if you use “strong” passwords with a mix of upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols.

What do you think, do masked password fields on mobile web pages actually enhance security? And even if they do in some small way are they worth the cost in usability; especially on sites where there’s no risk of financial loss?

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com

Opera has published some intersting statistics about his navigator Opera Mini

Here are the top 10 of most countries :

Russia

1. www.vkontakte.ru

2. win.mail.ru

3. www.google.com

4. www.rambler.ru

5. www.yandex.ru

6. www.dreamwar.ru

7. www.mamba.ru

8. www.marathonbet.com

9. www.dimonvideo.ru

10. www.wmod.ru

China

1. www.sina.com

2. www.baidu.com

3. www.google.cn

4. www.ko.cn

5. news.sohu.com

6. www.xiaonei.com

7. www.3g.cn

8. www.paojiao.com

9. www.188bet.com

10. www.feiku.com

United States

1. www.myspace.com

2. www.google.com

3. www.mocospace.com

4. www.yahoo.com

5. www.facebook.com

6. www.live.com

7. www.hi5.com

8. www.wikipedia.org

9. www.itsmy.com

10. www.ebay.com

India

1. www.orkut.com

2. www.google.com

3. in.m.yahoo.com

4. www.peperonity.com

5. gallery.mobile9.com

6. www.mocospace.com

7. www.160by2.com

8. www.mobango.com

9. www.itsmy.com

10. www.indianrail.gov.in

South Africa

1. www.facebook.com

2. www.google.com

3. intl.yahoo.com

4. www.peperonity.com

5. www.mocospace.com

6. www.gumtree.co.za

7. en.wikipedia.org

8. www.itsmy.com

9. news.bbc.co.uk

10. www.webmail.co.za

United Kingdom

1. www.facebook.com

2. www.google.co.uk

3. www.live.com

4. www.bebo.com

5. www.mocospace.com

6. news.bbc.co.uk

7. uk.yahoo.com

8. www.itsmy.com

9. www.faceparty.com

10. www.ebay.co.uk

JumpTap is a mobile search, advertising and content delivery (think ring tones and games) startup that got $22 million in round C funding recently. Their search business provides a “white label” search box on mobile carrier portals. Other white label search companies include FAST, InfoSpace and Medio. Compared to Google or Yahoo, white label search vendors claim to generate more revenue for the carrier by sharing a larger percentage of advertising dollars and by giving prominent placement in search results to the carrier’s billable content like ring tones. I suspect many carrier execs consider Google, Yahoo, AOL and MS Live as competitors for their advertising revenue and user allegiance and prefer not having them on their portals.

I’ve heard a lot about JumpTap but I’ve never seen their search service. The white label mobile search engines don’t advertise their urls and don’t seek off-portal visitors. They are usually accessible only from within the carrier’s network. Occasionally I find a carrier whose mobile web deck and white label search is on a public URL. I found FAST search (review) on Australian operator Telstra’s portal. Today I found JumpTap (la.jumptap.com/la/wap/) on Alltel’s portal (wap.alltel.motricity.com/portal/home).

I expected to see links back to the Alltel portal and to the carrier’s ring tone downloads prominently featured in JumpTap’s results. But when I searched for “Britney” I got links to fan sites and entertainment news. There were some ringtone sites in the results but they were off portal and even included free sites like MocoSpace! I did a number of other queries and didn’t see any real evidence of bias toward Alltel pages or products. I’d have to say that JumpTap, at least as configured for Alltel, is no more biased than Yahoo or Google. JumpTap doesn’t return as many hits as the well known engines but it seemed to be pretty good at returning a relevant and useful results for the queries I tried. I was pleasantly surprised by JumpTap’s search product. The best part is that it’s a pure mobile search engine that returns only sites that are designed for mobile rather than transcoded PC sites. Both Yahoo and Google emphasize transcoded web results over mobile ones. AOL and MS Live don’t even search the mobile web, returning only full web sites modified to be more mobile friendly. While transcoded pages have their place, they are never as usable on the tiny screen as well designed mobile pages.

Everyone seems to be trying to improve mobile search lately. There seems to be a consensus that the pure web search model doesn’t scale down very well. There’s considerable experimentation going on to try to provide answers rather than just a list of web pages containing the search terms. Google has added OneBoxes to mobile results – if your query contains the name of a sports team, you get a OneBox with scores and game schedules. Queries containing place names get a weather forecast OneBox while those with a company name get a stock quote. Yahoo Mobile Search has been doing something similar for awhile and just announced oneSearch which combines results from multiple Yahoo search engines like photos, maps and web on a single result page. oneSearch is part of the downloadable Yahoo! Go product but I suspect that it will soon be rolled into Yahoo’s mobile web search as well.

Jumptap’s innovation is to have a single search box return results grouped into categories like Mobile Web, News, Local, etc. After you submit your query you get a list of categories and then choose a category to see the results. The screen shot shows a result of a search for “Apple”. The News category contains stories about Apple published today, Mobile Web results are mostly items from Apple Tech sites like MacRumours. Chat results are various UPOC chat rooms with Apple in their name and Stock is a detailed APPL quote. I find this design works pretty well. I can enter shorter queries and use the categories as filters to zero in on the types of results I want. I didn’t expect to like JumpTap but I do.

Courtesy of Dennis at WapReview.com