Review

Mobile Internet for Dummies is a useful book if you have a smartphone and want to make more effective use of it. It has lots of links to mobile-enabled websites, including links to directories of mobile-enabled sites. There are pointers to downloadable software that enable or enhance instant messaging, email, games, and so on. There’s even a fairly large section on creating mobile content, via blogs, picture sites, mobile-enabled content management systems (CMS), and development kits.

Obviously mobile technology changes rapidly, so this is not a book with a long shelf-life. It was published this summer (2008), and seems to be up to date. Hopefully there will be revised editions as technology moves forward.

I use my smartphone all the time: to read bloglines, ap news, reuters news, wikipedia (via the wapedia front-end); email with gmail; google notebook, mobipocket reader, and on and on. But this book pointed me (or at least reminded me) that facebook and twitter both have mobile-enabled interfaces, as does blogger. And I had never heard of eBuddy before - a web-based front-end to all the major IM systems.

So this is a good resource to let you take better advantage of the technology you already own.

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