UBIK (open beta) Vs. Site.mobi
UBIK, a Volantis owned company, has now gone into Open Beta with its tool to create mobile web sites.
Tagged “Get Mobile Now”, it allows users to create full mobile web sites using their interactive interface. With lots of templates styles to choose from, all the user has to do is add pages, insert text, and upload images, in order to have a mobile presence.
Two interesting features that have been included, are the ability to make donations and payments through PayPal, and also the ability to upload photos directly from your mobile phone using MMS
Although the service offers a very Web 2.0 look and feel, the actual functionality of the site could be improved vastly to appeal to the likes of Bloggers and Content Owners. Enabling a simple RSS feed option to read in existing content from blogs and other content sources such as Flickr. Other functionality, that although simple, should be incorportated, to make more use of the properties of accessing the site on a mobile. For example, send a SMS/MMS using the smsto and mms to functionality (if device supported).
Compared to the likes of site.mobi (powered by mobisitegalore) this offers the user a more visually attractive user experience, with a greater variety of templates. The WYSIWYG interface for UBIK is clean and fast, and makes the most out of AJAX capabilities. Whereas, the templates on site.mobi looks very Microsoft Publisher 97.
This round goes to UBIK, but I hope that the additional functionality will make it into the final product. At the moment, UBIK are aiming at people who want simple static sites, and by the looks of it from the templates, at individuals who wish to have a mobile presence (is this the right market to be targeting?)
Visit my landing page at m.ubik.net
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