Microsoft has freshened up its MSN mobile home page for smartphones and the revamped page now has easier navigation, inline videos and just more overall polish.
What’s new? Well, let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth:
The page design provides smart phone users with the most usable, relevant mobile experience. From the new homepage, MSN Mobile users can enjoy access to a broad range of content and services, including programmed, dynamic news, sports, entertainment, video, money, weather, astrology, and dating content, along with 1-click access to services such as Bing, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.
I can’t say I frequent MSN on the desktop but I gave the new mobile site a spin on my Droid and it looks good. The news stories are laid out in a manageable fashion, the categories are varied but I had problems getting the videos to play. I was trying to check out “Palin endorses family, faith and the flag” and was hit with a “No video format for your phone.” I whipped out my iPod Touch and was able to play the video. Let’s hope that’s just opening day jitters because competitors have been delivering news videos to the Droid for a while.
You can also drill down into each individual section and I thought this was well done. If you’re a Hotmail user, you can jump into your inbox with a click. As you’d expect, there’s also strong Bing integration that leads to auto-suggestions for search queries. You can also personalize the content so your weather, stocks or astrology are tailored for what you want.
Microsoft said the new website will be accessible by about 40% of devices, including the iPhone, Android, Opera 9.5 on Windows Mobile or Palm’s webOS. You can check it out by visiting mobile.msn.com from your applicable handset and let me know how your video experience works.
[Via MSN, hat tip to PhoneScoop]