Mobile Awesomeness Blog

Mobify is another fantastic platform available to website creators that does most of the heavy lifting if you want a quality mobile experience for your users. Thanks to mobile platforms like this one (others listed here), gone are the days when you have to hire a mobile expert or web developer to have a mobile site that works across various platforms.

What differentiates it from platforms like MoFuse (reviewed last week) is flexibility with regards to the design and layout. Although Mobify is hosted, it gives you complete control over the mobile stylesheets. Combine the style control with an extremely helpful interface that makes it painfully simple to select what elements you want as part of the mobile site, and you can see why major websites are taking notice and using this platform. Among them are A List Apart, McDonald's and Spin Magazine, among others.

Like most other players in this space, they have a basic free account, and I believe monthly pricing as well. I would expand on the pricing, but it was surprisingly nowhere available on the website. For an introduction to the platform, check out this video:

View more screencasts here.

MoFuse is a mobile platform that pretty much anyone can use to create a mobile version of their website. Actually, it took about 15 minutes to create one for our site until we have the opportunity to do it up right. They have a really nice dashboard where you can setup design details, add pages, view analytics and more. Blogs with up to 2 feeds/pages are free, and their premium subscription ranges from $39/month to $199/month.

If you want unlimited control and customizations for your mobile site, this is not the platform for you. However, if you want something simple, easy to create and instantly compatible with 4,500+ devices, MoFuse is for you. For more, check out the tour, or create a free site here.

Here are some highlights from the most recent AdMob metrics report, released a couple of weeks ago:

• The story in March is Android. The HTC Dream (aka G1), while still the 10th most popular device (4th in smartphones), is showing impressive growth of 47% on average between November '08 and March '09. With more Android handsets on schedule for release in 2009, it could be a huge year for Google's infant OS.
• With an increase of 17% over February, requests continue stellar growth. However, a higher percentage than ever are coming from mobile applications, rather than websites.
• Requests from the US increased nearly 4%, while all other top countries decreased or had minimal gains in March.
• Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch continue stellar growth in the worldwide handset market, each increasing market share 2.1%, while all other handsets had minimal gains/losses +/- 1%.
• Samsung took over the #2 spot in the US for most requests at 17.6%, formerly held by Motorola, who saw a decrease of 1.6% to 16.8%.

The following stats are based on 7,654,044,490 requests:

Top 5 Countries

1. United States (47.5%, +3.9%)
2. Indonesia (9.2%, -5.1%)
3. India (7.6%, +0.2%)
4. Philippines (3.9%, 0%)
5. United Kingdom (2.9%, 0%)

Top 5 Worldwide Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (13.3%, +2.1%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (8.8%, +2.1%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (2.7%, -0.2%)
4. Nokia N70 (2.1%, -0.3%)
5. Samsung R450 (2.0%, +0.7%)

Top 5 US Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (17.0%, +0.6%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (12.1%, +1.5%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (5.0%, -0.8%)
4. Samsung R450 (4.2%, 1.2%)
5. Blackberry 8300 (Curve) (3.3%, +0.2%)

Download the full report here: http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics