MINICK  has launched a dedicated mobile Internet site designed specifically for iPhone browsers for the US release of the upcoming animated Universal Pictures movie, The Tale of Despereaux.
Traditionally, we create a single mobile internet site which then dynamically renders for over 2000 device profiles recognised by our platform to ensure each mobile phone has the best viewing experience, says MINICK UK Managing Director, Lourens de Beer. But this meant we also had to design sites for the lowest common denominator when it came to site functionality.
We have experienced massive growth in traffic from iPhone browsers across all our managed portals, and specifically for the movie portals we manage on behalf of Universal Pictures in the USA. Web statistics for universalpictures.mobi show the iPhone has grown from being outside the top 30 visiting browser accessing the site in March 2008 to becoming the top visiting browser in November 2008. As a result, we felt it was the ideal opportunity to deliver a more tailored site that showcase the enhanced capabilities of the iPhone browser, compared to other mobile phones.
Although the iPhone does not support Flash, it does support Javascript, so MINICK has designed a site that looks radically different and navigates in a different manner to typical mobile Internet sites. There is no need to zoom in and out, the trailer video has been optimised for the iPhone and the navigation makes use of the sliding images capability of the browser.
We plan to launch many more iPhone specific sites for major movie release next year alongside the traditional mobile Internet sites, and also extend this concept to other popular Smartphones, such as the Blackberry Storm and Nokia N97.
The site can be viewed at www.universalpictures.mobi/ttod but at the risk of stating the obvious, MINICK points out that the only way to see the version designed for the iPhone is on an iPhone.