Plusmo Puts Mo’ On Your Mobile

One of the coolest things about cell phones and the internet is that we are really just in the beginning stages of it.  With advances in software and devices, it seems that each generation gets a little better and more useable.

Meet Plusmo.com [PC - Mobile].  Their service  is cool for a lot of reasons.  The first is glaringly obvious.  It is simple to setup, from either your PC or your mobile.  Now that’s cool.  Most sites want to you to set up service from your PC, which greatly limits their mobile appeal, not so the case here.  Setup basically consists of choosing which “widgets” you want to be displayed on your phone.  They’ll initially recommend a handful of them - which you can simply uncheck if you so desire.  You can add “widgets” from any number of categories, ranging from news to sports to fun stuff.  The service boasts over 20,000 of these widgets.  Now that’s a lot of widgets.

As cool as the existing widgets are, you are not limited to just those.  If you have existing RSS feeds that you aggregate in a reader for your PC, you can now view them on your mobile with Plusmo.com.  And since you probably know how to set up an RSS feed in your reader, we won’t go into how to find it.  Rest assured, adding one to the service takes literally two button clicks.  For those that are so inclined, if you have an OPML file you wish to import, they’ve got your number as well.  Very cool.

You can access the service from your phone two different ways (from what we can tell - if there’s more let us know.)  You can choose to use a java-based program that resides on your phone (if your phone is supported, of course) or you can access the service directly through http://www.plusmo.com/wap.  Options are good.

And for the iPhone users, you guys get special love from Plusmo.  Figures.  And since we don’t have an iPhone, we couldn’t test this for you.  Sorry.

From a user standpoint, the service is quick and easy to setup and equally easy to modify it as your tastes change.  There is, however, another side of Plusmo.com that infinitely increases the cool factor.

With the advent of RSS, publishing and syndicating information on the web has been taken to a whole new level.  With mobile internet gaining speed, one of the hurdles has been harnessing this power to be more portable and keeping it easy to access.  Plusmo.com’s service for publishing content is both quick and easy, and best of all, it’s free. 

So we here at wapSwap (always giving you more for your money) decided to try this out as well.  And since mobile optimized is our bag (it’s how we roll, baby!), we went ahead and set up a widget for wapSwap’s moBlog.  (Check out the sign up button under this post.)  It even links back to the original article as well.  Very well thought out.

So, to sum up, it’s seems the good folks at Plusmo.com have a winner on their hands.  Setup for users and publishers is very straightforward and using the service is a real pleasure.  The only problems that we found were that we never did get our text message or email from registering.  I’m not sure that we really need it, because we were able to set things up fine.  Just sayin’ - you guys may want to look into that.

Added to the Portals directory.

-wS.