Its quite interesting surfing the web from a PDA/Smartphone,  just to see who's homepages recognises that you are connecting in from a mobile device.

I took the top 10 most popular websites globally as listed at -

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

So here's the results(using Windows Mobile 6 emulator QVGA Landscape, with a locale of English US and set to single column view.

1. Yahoo  http://www.yahoo.com

Doesn't look very mobile friendly to me...

2. Microsoft Network (MSN)  http://www.msn.com

Wow...   Not nice at all..

3. Google http://www.google.com

Hooray...   A proper mobile page...

4. YouTube http://www.youtube.com

I don't know whether my luck or design, but this looks pretty mobile friendly..

5. Myspace http://www.myspace.com

Looks good to me...   

6. Windows Live http://www.live.com

Phew, a mobile page.   However doesn't seem to be branded as Live.

7. Baidu.com www.baidu.com

OK, Baidu is a Chinese search engine (you learn something everyday),  so maybe on a Chinese device this will look fantastic.  I'll reserve comment.

8. Orkut.com http://www.orkut.com

Looks pretty good to me.

9. QQ.Com www.qq.com

QQ, Chinese focused instant messaging site, looks mobile friendly to me.

10. Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.com

Hard to tell but on scrolling down didn't appear to be particularly mobile friendly.

I appreciate that lots of the listed companies do have mobile specific url's, i.e mobile.msn.com,  but just wondered on first hit to theses popular sites what the user experience would be.

I posted some time back, about a simple bit of code to detect if your at least connecting in with a Windows CE based device to a web page,  hint hint offenders above

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