Finally! WordPress has launched two mobile themes that will be automatically rendered when someone accesses the WordPress blogs with a “compatible mobile phone“. These themes will be independent of the themes rendered on web browsers. It will only depend on the type of mobile phone used.
According to the Official WordPress blog, mobile devices account for over 60 million page views per month on WordPress.com blogs. The main reason for the launch of these mobile themes is said to be the inability of the older phones to render the widget and theme heavy blogs on their browsers using ancient technology.
For the advanced phones (iPhone and Android) having latest browsers, they have launched the modified version of WPtouch theme. For all other phones they have launched the advanced version of their stripped down WordPress Mobile Edition theme.
Both these themes do not have a huge difference between the design and quality. The main focus is on displaying the main content as fast as possible, although the iPhone version has slightly better graphics.
WordPress also gives its users the option to disable the mobile themes (Although i see no reason why would anyone do that!). You can disable the mobile themes by going to Dashboard>Appearance>Extras and uncheck “Display a mobile theme when this blog is viewed with a mobile browser”.
For more details, you can check the Mobile Themes Support page
Whilst providing for mobile is definitely a good thing, the move to just offer a decent user experience for just a few phones is a bit of 2 steps forward, 1 step back.
What would be ideal, is to provide a consistent experience for all phones whilst at the same time retaining all branding (whether thats just a colour scheme or whatever)
For self hosted blogs, you can do all of this and more by installing the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for wordpress. You can upload a mobile logo as well as changing every element of the mobile CSS. You also get a ton of options so you can really customize your mobile visitors mobile experience.
The URL is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/ and it’d be great to hear what you thought of it
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