Sweet! It looks like my old team over at Microsoft finally got the first beta of MSN Mobile out the door! I worked on testing the underlying web services that run the site. It was quite a challenge in December all the way through when I quit Microsoft. We had to do a bunch of load tests that just didn't want to work right. Finally we realized that our load generation tool was just funky and didn't give us the right sort of load characteristics that the operations folks wanted to see. Anyway, I worked up until about 7:30pm on my last day to help them get over this hump and it looks like they finally pulled it off.

Well, don't just sit there, go check it out:. MSN Mobile Device homepage

If you wanna be fancy, just go to beta.mobile.msn.com and it will redirect you depending on fi you're a PC or mobile phone...I know, I know...oooo, aaaaah. But seriously, there are two pages geared towards different purposes. The PC homepage kinda gives you the gist of what you're getting yourself into, while the mobile page is where the meat of the whole thing is.

Other nice features: the site knows what kind of device you are visiting on and tries to resize images, and change the layout depending on your device's screen size. A good example of this is if you have a Pocket PC with flip out keyboard. You'll see that if you visit the site on portrait mode versus landscape mode, you'll see a slightly different layout.

Anyway, I want to give a shout out to my old team for getting this done and going from having the msn mobile project dropped in our laps to to a fully functioning site in pretty short amount of time (considering all of the msn specific hoops we had to jump through).

Windows Live Mobile Throwdown
Originally uploaded by titaniumtommy.

So which is better? Without a doubt, Microsoft's was the winner.

Even just comparing the mapping and traffic capabilities, this matchup could have been a bit uneven. We were running WLS on a Windows Mobile phone, which gave it a "native-app" feel, because it was a native app. Google Maps on Java ran like Java always does. Painfully

I've been deeply enthralled with my Windows Mobile 5.0 powered PPC-6700 from Sprint. LIttle pocket gizmos have come a long way since my hasty retreat from the nearly unusable Palm II. Even browsing the web is speedy enough because of the wicked EVDO network that blankets the Bay Area and other metro areas. While Pocket IE does a pretty good job of squeezing websites onto the tiny screen, I've been using Skweezer to strip out superflous formatting and just give me the goods.

Reading Scoble's blog, I found that MSN has their own skweezer type service for mobile phones. I'm going to have to give it a go and see which is nicer. I do however like that Skweezer allows me to keep favorites and what not, but if MSN does a better job of reformatting pages, I'll have to go with design over bells and whistles.

See For Yourself.