Get out more!

I wonder how many users indeed have an iPhone. If the new site shuts out Windows Mobile users it does not help me that it brings along new features.

Thanks!
:)

Hank,

if this matches the internal statistics drawn from your very own user base (--> logfile of the old mobile site) this is indeed a wise move.

Sigh. That old site sure had some glitches, but for the most part worked fine for me. Used it on a daily bases. Bye, bye, mobility.

What's with CPod's obsession with iPhones? I use a blackberry at work and an ipaq at home. Only 2% of smartphones are iPhones, and they have yet to be released in Canada, but are coming sometime this year however only on 1 provider. According to another article posted a few days later, that surge in iPhone traffic was brief, and is now second behind Symbian OS phones.

Hi Hank

I spent a little time on m.chinesepod.com on my iPodTouch and like the mobile site very, very much. Really easy to listen to podcasts through it. The glossary is a terrific teaching tool for listening comprehension. The font size is perfect for my middle-age eyes, but I am wondering if it intentionally disallows changing size (pinching the screen) or is that a bug?

Great work, Hank. Keep it up, keep leading and innovating. It's inspiring.

Why is m.chinesepod.com open only to paying users? How can I check it out?

I tried this on my Palm using Blazer and it works pretty well except there's no audio or popup translations.

I also liked the mobile site on my Palm TX.  Looks great and loads much faster than before.  The only problem is that I couldn't view characters.  Bazza, how do you view them on your TX?  CJKOS?

Yeah, characters work for me.

Just tried it on my mobile, Nokia 6680 using Opera, and it doesn't work at all. I get "XML parsing failed: mismatched tag (Line: 11, Character: 2)".

@Moloch,

I am a Canadian myself (Vancouver) and definitely sympathize with the lack of iPhone availability in Canada. The fact is though, 66% of ChinesePod users are from the US and quite frankly the iPhone provides the best learning experience right now. As the other platforms catch up (BTW, we are starting to work with Nokia here in China) we will definitely port the app.

@frenchpoddy01,

The mobile site is only available to paid users because the functionality that is available on the mobile site is only available to paid users (e.g. personal lessons feed, personal vocabulary lists). I am sure there is room for improvement in the design of the site, but I will try to write up a full post describing why we designed this version of the site they way we did, as well as breaking down the design decisions behind he mobile site.

It is definitely not our intention to shut out users, but we are trying to create the best experience for the largest number of users. This is especially difficult for the mobile context! We based our design decisions on articles like these:

• link 1
  
• link 2
  
• link 3

From June 08 the iPhone will be a 3G phone!

All I need on a mobile version are basic text (simple HTML) pages with

- the lesson dialoges

- the conversations (reading & posting).

No popups, no graphics, no gimmicks, but including the characters.

A side question on portable devices and chinesepod. i'm looking at buying a new mp3 player. Which brands and models will show the transcripts imbedded in the audio? I'm assuming a 3rd gen ipod nano would do it, am i correct?

@henning,

I definitely do sympathize with where you are coming from. Again, this is the challenge of designing a mobile experience across various platforms, networks & devices. Our paying customer base is very similar to our general user base with 2/3's being located in the US. Since the iPhone is the dominant mobile platform there, we tried to optimize the experience for those users. In our tests the previous mobile site performed very poorly for those users.

We are absolutely committed to trying our best to support ALL of our users, but sometimes we have to make decisions that involve trade-offs (e.g. limited support of traditional characters).

I also don't understand designing the mobile site to work strictly on the iPhone. Most business people in the U.S. are using Blackberrys, Windows Mobile and Palm devices.  The iPhone seems to be more popular with the folks who like having the latest high-tech toys.  Question: who's more likely to be one of your premium subscribers?  Maybe both types are but discounting the large number of business people is not wise.

No doubt, you will have a more feature-rich and plesant Internet experience on the iPhone but I, foremost, want the ChinesePod mobile site to get the basics right first.  That is, convenient access to the lesson podcasts.

Maybe if you wanted to add some extra bells-n-whistles that only the iPhone supported then fine but leave that for another release.  I really think you are doing a disservice by focusing too narrowly on just one platform.

@boran,

To be clear the mobile browser site is designed in UTF-8 XHTML which means that it is by no means closed, proprietary or only can work on the iPhone. It is simply optimized for the iPhone in terms of screen size, functionality (e.g. using MP3's instead of Flash for audio playback), etc. In fact, taking a browser-based approach over an OS-only approach is a more open way of doing things.

It is absolutely true there are other mobile device in the US, but right now certain functions require browser access. For example, the most popular mobile function is flashcard review on-the-go. In terms of mobile browser surfing the iPhone is clearly a step above the rest.

To further improve mobile usability, we are looking at ways that we can also bring specific functions (e.g. glossary lookup, flashcard review) locally to the student's phone via a Symbian-app, iPhone-app, etc. When we get closer to the planning stages for these app's we will definitely ask for wishlists on functionality.

Hank,

interestingly the regular site works on my mobile browser (although this eats up my 30 MB monthly download volume pretty fast).

I could imagine that the characters were displayed properly if you added the following meta-tag to the HTML-pages:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

@henning,

I will forward the request to the tech team and let you know when it is updated. Hopefully it will solve your encoding issues.

As your mobile site is for us paying customers only anyway - shouldn't the platform decision be based on device availability in your paying audience instead of some rather vague statistics on overall US mobile traffic? Isn't that even more problematic when considering that more than 30% of your customers reside outside the US?

What is the logic behind providing "the best user experience" to 0.1 % of your audience while the rest cannot read characters or browse comments?

I know there are many Windows-Mobile users around here and those smartphones are *definately* state of the art. The iPhone is an overly expensive, prorietory solution that still lacks several basic functions like UMTS (3G) support.

At least try to bring back some sort of basic mobile support for "the rest of us". Ideally you set up a parallel "general mobile site" next to that proprietary "iPhone site". Until those other platforms "catch up"