The whole world in your palm

Posted by rajajang

February 21, 2008

Mobile phones nowadays offer a wide range of functionality including web access and e-mails besides the usual call and SMS functions. But there is still one area that has not found its way in the mainstream usage: information sharing between the internet and handsets.

For example, many popular websites are not yet optimised for mobile surfing, and issues such as large-size images and horizontal scrolling pose a problem even with high-compression-enabled browsers such as Opera Mini.

Further, if one comes across an interesting piece of text over the web or in a PDF file attachment through e-mail, it is a hassle to make it available on mobile phone for offline viewing later, unless one is well-versed in connecting phones with PCs through cable, Infrared or Bluetooth.

To solve this problem, several companies have launched free services that allow users to make web data of their choice (videos, text, etc.) available on their phones like Mozilla Joey.

Then there are free services such as Unyverse, also called mobile wikis. Mobile wikis allow users to cut and paste any chunk of information using a free web account which can be read over mobile phone through their own custom mobile application or vice-versa. Let us see what functionalities Unyverse provides besides being a mobile-based wiki.

Unyverse is a small 150KB application available as a standard JAR file for Java-enabled phones. There is a Blackberry version available as well, and both of them can be downloaded from http://unyverse.com. You can either download it on PC and transfer it to your mobile phone, or use it directly on the phone using the web address. After downloading, you will be required to sign up online with the service to get a username and password for accessing and creating a personal account.

Once you receive the password over e-mail, log-on to the Unyverse’s website and check out the categories: Contacts, Notebooks, RSS News, Wiki Groups and Wikipedia. As the name suggests, these are all free-to-edit wikis where contacts, notes and other information can be added. In the RSS News section, news feed title and URL can be pasted, whereas in Wiki Group, users can join forum-type lists from a collection of interest-based categories like Gadget Lovers under Technology.

One feature to note here is, the stuff from local PC drives or other websites such as an interesting but lengthy article - which one wishes to read on the go using mobile phone, can simply be pasted in Notebooks wiki. Users can define their own new wikis as well to arrange information in a logically categorised manner.

Once the information is available in the form of notes, news feeds, etc., it is time to check these out by using the phone. Open up the application Unyverse, and press Yes at the internet access permission prompt. The first menu will appear, showing names of all the wikis as expandable menu items that can be explored to access sub-menus. Note that the information pasted on the web is optimised for mobile browsing before it is displayed, thus saving precious download size for majority of users who do not have unlimited GPRS package and have to pay at per MB rates for uploads and downloads. Network activity can be viewed exactly by going to the menu Settings > Device info > Network Usage. Checking this menu before and after a major activity such as RSS feed download reveals the size of download. This download counter is commutative and resets after a month.

One of the non-wiki features of Unyverse is its excellent support for Wikipedia. Although users cannot add articles from the web-interface to be read on handset, they can fetch articles directly on the handset in a very readable format. The application menu Public Wikis > Wikipedia brings up two items: Search and My Articles. Searching ‘Pakistan,’ for example, results in only headings appearing initially, from Summary to External Links – where each can be read individually. This saves time of downloading an entire page as a browser would do.

Further, it makes it easy to go through a lengthy piece of article as one can always press Back button and hop to different headings. The view of article is semi-html in the sense that images are done away with, but hyperlinks to other articles still appear in standard blue underline format. Reading Wikipedia on the move has never been that easy. Researchers and students who gather and read for their reference material off the news items (RSS) and Wikipedia can make use of Unyverse even on a low-end device with enough Jar size to install this application.

By this time, we have seen what can be downloaded or accessed using Unyverse. But the application also offers two-way communication. Since wiki is a way of editing pages any time, and is collaborative in nature, Unyverse lives up to this term by allowing the phone application user to edit wikis and such changes appear over the website almost instantly.

Imagine taking notes in one of the defined Notebooks wikis using mobile phone and, within a few seconds, the application automatically connects to the internet using GPRS and updates the web profile. User can access this auto-uploaded information from anywhere since it is web-based and wikis are in sync to show the same version. The application on mobile phone does not require an always-on internet connection to display the downloaded information.

Users can make use of their shared content offline with same productivity as online by pressing ‘No’ at the connectivity permissions prompt at the startup. Albeit some warning messages, the application still shows the notes taken, the downloaded news items (headlines as well as details) and Wikipedia articles – bookmarked through ‘Start’ marking functionality or by searching the exact term in offline mode. Then, there is a tips menu and adjustable text size for easy reading as well.

So, if sharing content between the web and your mobile phone is up your alley, do check out this multi-functional service called Unyverse.

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