Yesterday Netvibes launched a version of their service for mobile phones available at m.netvibes.com. I’ve been playing around with it using the RIM browser and Opera Mini on a BlackBerry 8700g for a day now and the first impressions are good when using the RIM browser. The site doesn’t seem to work in Opera Mini at all, though. That surprises me. I’d like to know why.
Some widgets like Google Maps and flickr streams don’t work. I can understand that the AJAX laden Google Maps would not work on the RIM browser, but I am at a loss why RSS streams with images won’t show up.
I haven’t registered much noise on the ‘net about the launch yet. The Netvibes blog doesn’t didn’t mention it [yesterday].
Take it for a test spin on your mobile devices and let me know how you fared!
Update 1:
Samy wrote a comment to let me know that there is a separate address for the iPhone version. He also mentions that there is a list of supported widgets at m.netvibes.com/help.php. The iPhone version at iphone.netvibes.com. However the iPhone version does not work very well on the BlackBerry 8700g. Thank you, Samy!
Update 2:
When trying out the iPhone version of Netvibes I just discovered that there are some access issues. When several people behind our proxy are logged in on Netvibes at the same time, I get the start page of the other person who logged in most recently when accessing iphone.netvibes.com. That is to say I can see all the tabs of this user and all the pages they may have already accessed/loaded in that same session. Is it just me being paranoid or do you also think this is a major security issue? Perhaps we should take a look at some phone security statistics and get real. It’s good to be apprehensive, although technology is a safe way of doing things these days, it needs to be secure from hackers.
Update 3:
The Netvibes development team says in an email that they’ve fixed the proxy security issue and that they knew about it before launch. Nice that they responded that fast, but I find it a bit careless to knowingly launch new services with such issues unresolved.