Installation
The first step towards installing Mobizines is either downloading a .jar file to your computer and installing it to your phone via cable, bluetooth or other means. Alternatively, sending an SMS to 63333 containing "mobi [publication name]" will get you started. The message costs 25p plus operator charges; not bad at all.
Cheap skates as we are, we tried out the download-to-PC method. However, of the range of phones for which installers exist, the one used for testing wasn't there, so we tried some of them anyway. Alas, they weren't designed for the phone, and either didn't work, or were extremely slow.
The phone used for testing was the Nokia N70 Smartphone running Symbian Series 60v2 OS. It turns out that Mobizines is compatible with the N70 (and so it should be,) but the software can only, as far as we can see, be obtained via the SMS method.
The SMS approach to installation is straightforward, but takes a few steps. First, send off the text message. Next, a reply is sent to the phone containing a hyperlink. Opening that in the phone's web browser loads a page that checks what phone is being used, thus deciding compatibility and which version of Mobizines to install. A download manager is then downloaded. This manager is then run, which connects and downloads the actual software we're interested in, and finally, installs it.
Now ready to fire up Mobizines for the first time, we dived in. Seeing as we asked for GQ magazine, that's what we got, but before checking out just what was delivered, we thought we'd poke about it the software and see what other publications we could have.
The collection ranges from trashy gossip mags to news headlines from the BBC - a small range at the moment, but here's enough choice there for most people to make use of, and further publications will appear in due course.
Note that along with the list of publications in the above picture, Symbian OS's task-switcher is active. On Smartphones at least, it appear that Mobizines is constructed in Macromedia (or is that Adobe these days?) Flash. In fact, we reckon Flash player took up most of the download time during installation.
Discovering that the software ran in Flash was actually quite a shock. The interface was extremely smooth, and detailed to the point of still providing battery and signal-level meters. It's extremely slick to use and (subjectively of course) more responsive than the menus of the OS itself. It stands to reason then, that we found Mobizines very easy to use, and that impression was formed before we even bothered to check out some content.