Tag Archives: Site news

Lost In Mobile: Beta Testing

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Shaun

The days of PDA-247 are numbered… PDA-247 is a large site and currently holds more than 6,000 news articles, reviews and thoughts. The current setup simply isn’t working well and it’s time to move away from WordPress and a standard host- 247 is close to hitting traffic and memory limits in 3 separate areas.

I have decided to take the opportunity to change (for the final time!) the name of the site to something more generic and Lost In Mobile is the chosen one. It’s for those of you who are lost in the greatness of the modern mobile experience and for those of you who are lost for a moment and need some help. Lost In Mobile will cater for everyone.

I need your help though.

Please take a trip over to www.lostinmobile.com and try out as much of the site as you can. I want your views on how the comments system works, how easy you find it to navigate and if you think it is faster than PDA-247 (it should be 2 to 3 times faster).

Bear in mind that some work still needs to be done such as consistency on the fonts across the site, the logo and some other tweaks are still needed. I have tried to make the design as similar to PDA-247 as possible so it should feel familiar.

No articles will be posted on 247 over the weekend, they will be on L.I.M. to give you the chance to use it properly.

15 Comments


AppVerse launched on PDA-247

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Shaun

AppVerse has been launched within the PDA247 store. AppVerse is a new social network for sharing and discovering mobile apps.  Within AppVerse, you can:

-Find and follow people you know and recommended AppVerse community leaders.
-Invite your friends to join AppVerse.
-Share your app purchases, ratings, and reviews.
-Create pubic Lists where you can add apps you believe are the best apps for that list.
-Ask questions about apps – get advice and info from other users.
-Link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
-Interact with app developers (who receive notifications when users review or comment on their apps).
-Click to purchase any app you discover.
-Earn discounts and free apps (coming soon).

2 Comments

Samsung Galaxy 2 review

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Shaun

A number of you have asked when a review of the Galaxy S 2 will be posted on 247. The full review will go up on Wednesday with a follow up on Thursday comparing it to the iPhone 4. The comparison is not what you may expect.

1 Comment


Easter

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Shaun

To those of you that celebrate, I hope that you have a great Easter. The content will be slightly less on 247 for the next few days (got to take advantage of those public holidays), but everything will be back to normal on Tuesday.

4 Comments

iPad 247 probs

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Shaun

Anyone else having problems viewing 247 on the iPad? Arnold explains his here- “First and foremost, thanks for the years of dedication to the site. It starts my day. I am having problems reading it in Safari on my iPad. The page loads. The control header us there, but the content doesn’t display.

I tap on the screen, rotate the iPad, swipe the screen and maybe the content appears – but forget about tapping on a link, because when I come back – the same calisthenics.

Don’t know how to explain it better. Hope it helps.”

28 Comments


This week

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Shaun

As I said last week, content will be lower over the next few days due to a holiday. There is something interesting already pre-loaded for each day so don’t go anywhere will you…

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Next week

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Shaun

I will be away for a few days next week to spend some quality time with my beautiful children. I am trying to get some interesting content up, but would appreciate some help. If you have any thoughts, reviews or anything else mobile related that you believe to be worthy of publishing please drop me a line at shaun (at) mailstm.co.uk. Thanks!

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More changes

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Shaun

A few more small changes have been made to the site. The recent comments and most commented are now in the sidebar and there are social network (Twitter and Facebook) buttons below each article. PLEASE use these when you want to share a 247 article- it really will help to drive traffic to the site.

I am looking into excerpts which is now as easy as it sounds and some other changes- you will see them appear when they are done.

1 Comment

Dailynewsreviewsthoughtsanddiscussioneverydayoftheweekoftheyear.co.uk

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Shaun

After much thought I have decided not to use the Lost In Mobile name for 247 in the future. Instead I have chosen something more descriptive.  Dailynewsreviewsthoughtsanddiscussioneverydayoftheweekoftheyear.co.uk will be the new domain name and I hope you like it. I wanted something easy to remember, but slightly different and hope that you agree that it is the way forward for 247.

8 Comments

Server down

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Shaun

Apologies for the downtime earlier. Not sure why everything fell over, but we are back up. Time to add your comments to today’s content!

2 Comments

Lost In Mobile

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Shaun

Lost In Mobile. That is the new name for PDA-247.


It is finally time to ditch the ’247′ name and the ‘PDA’ term is also way past the time when nobody knew what a PDA was anyway.

This site has been through many names since it was first launched 9 years ago; Clie World, Clie Planet, PDANews24, Palm 247 / Windows Mobile 247 / Symbian 247 and finally PDA-247.

A website cannot keep changing names and so a generic title was needed, and Lost In Mobile will be the one. There is still a ‘lot’ of work to do to ensure that all of the current content keeps the same URLs and that the domains are switched without losing any traffic so it could still be a couple of weeks before you see any changes, and there will be many more changes besides a name change.

———

A while back I emailed some of you to advise that PDA-247 was shutting down. I woke up one day and imagined my life without the constant pressure of adding daily news, thoughts, reviews and the like and I liked what I saw.

I then imagined my life without PDA-247 and realised that it was something that I am very proud of and something that makes me a little different to others.

It will be different in the future, there doesn’t need to be a set number of articles per day. I am not engadget, I am just an ‘I’ and can never compete with company run websites. PDA-247 (Lost In Mobile) is not a link chaser who makes up clever headlines to attract traffic and it is as genuine as I can make it.

The site is all about discussion and the thoughts of you and I. It is a place to talk about what we do with our mobile devices, help others and to discuss all things mobile. It will remain that way, but I will be taking a more relaxed approach to it in the future and hopefully it will continue to grow. To those of you who have offered to help, I will be in touch soon. To the rest of you- thanks for sticking with me all this time.

 

12 Comments

Can you help?

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Shaun

If anyone out there is particularly skilled with website design, graphics or WordPress please get in touch if you have a few spare minutes to help me change some things. I can do it all, but the reading up time and my potential to screw things up big style would be best avoided. If you can help, please get in touch via shaun (at) mailstm.co.uk. Thanks!

1 Comment

Forget the web app

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Shaun

The new 247 mobile site is working well, but the iOS web app is not as fast as I would like. Everything functions as it should, but it simply is not as fast as browsing through Safari on an iPhone or iPad. It isn’t slow as such, but should be quicker. There is no technical reason from our side as to why this is happening, so I would suggest a standard bookmark at the moment. I will hopefully be able to remove the web app function when new home screen bookmarks are created which will solve the problem completely or maybe Apple will find a workaround soon…

2 Comments

247 mobile enhanced

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Shaun

I am really tired because I stayed up until a silly hour last night tweaking the new mobile version of PDA-247. Really tired!

It is now live and your feedback would be great so that I can see what needs changing to make it work as you would all like. There are some points to remember-

  • If you are on an iPad, try the landscape mode which should look pretty cool.
  • If you save PDA-247 as a shortcut on your homepage it will automatically become a web app and act like one without the browser header etc. I am designing a new icon to be the default in iOS which should be live in a couple of days and I am also looking into a navigation issue when enabled as a web app which seems to affect the ability to go back a page in mobile safari.
  • It should work with all mobile devices and defaults have been set for iOS, Android, Bada, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone. webOS, Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Java phones.
  • The ‘Share or Save’ feature at the bottom of each article will let you share articles on Twitter, Facebook or via email and you can also save to Del.icio.us and Instapaper.

Feel free to try to break it and any feedback or ideas to improve it would be appreciated via the comments link. I hope you enjoy the change and if you don’t, just use the switch at the bottom of the mobile site to switch back to desktop mode.

10 Comments

Is the squeeze worth the juice?

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Shaun

Peter sent me the following last week concerning the way the mobile web has changed over the past few years- “Half the problem from my view is that 5 years ago, smartphones were ours.  We tweaked them, made them do shiny things, and looked at all our colleagues with their paper diaries who missed the odd meeting because they didn’t have a smartphone beeping in their pocket. In a way it felt like a club.

Now? I still feel like I’m in a minority, but just because everyone has a smartphone now, and just uses it as it is. They don’t care about the extras. The difference is we’ve lost that special feeling. When I’m “trying a new smartphone” (of which there’s 5 new ones a day – gone are the new device once a year days) there’s already 30 reviews on the web from around the world, consisting of hearsay, poor content, and every so often someone who’s actually used the device.  Customise my device? These days things change too often for that. Sad reality of changed times.

Worst of all in my mind – the only reason they’re called smartphones is because we spent 10 years using them for our calendars and tasks, and other such things. They won’t really be used in business, but they did that stuff, and gave us that edge.  And yes, the odd bit of entertainment came in to it too.  Don’t get me wrong, I like to play a game, but it’s not why I own a device, or ever did in fact. However, it is why 95% of owners now do I suspect.”

Some of you may have been expecting to read something today about the future of PDA-247, or rather the lack of it, but I need more time and so expect to put something up next week. Thanks for your patience…

1 Comment