WapReview

Ski and snowboarding season is fast approaching in North America and Europe. Here are a couple of mobile web sites to keep you up to date with conditions on your favorite slopes.

My Slopes is a comprehensive guide to hundreds of ski resorts in 11 European countries. The site is logically organized by nation and region, with each resort getting its own page loaded with facts like the number, difficulty and length of trails, resort amenities, five day weather forecast and current snow conditions.

My Slopes scored a four out of five on the Ready.mobi test suite and should load quickly and display well on all handsets.  Usability is generally pretty good, but could be improved by adding Access Keys for one click navigation to commonly used features.

InfoSpace Ski Report - If you're not in Europe and the state of your personal economy precludes jetting to Courchevel for a week of skiing, InfoSpace's Ski Report can help you keep tabs on ski conditions closer to home. The site covers all the major resorts in the US and Canada plus a good selection of the better known ones in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. Listings include current snow depth, number of open and closed runs and lifts and projected season closing days for each resort.

Something essential that is missing from Ski Report is weather reports.  There are links to AccuWeather.com on most pages but they link to the Accuweather home page rather than to the appropriate forecast page for the resort or region.

Although the site only scores a three out of five on the Ready.mobi test,  I had no trouble using it on any of my phones.  Page sizes are small (under 10KB) and there are few images so it loads quickly even at GPRS speeds. Usability is generally very good but, as with My Slopes, would be even better with the addition of Access Keys.

Infospace no longer offers this service.

Nevada and California ski reports, road conditions, hotel information from the Nevada Commission on Tourism

Ski Reports and other information for Vancouver area ski resort Grouse Mountain.  The site provides current weather and snow conditions, lift status, hours of opperation, driving directions and click to call contact numbers. 

shralp.com is a one year old snowboarding video blog (vlog) site. Shralp releases a new video every Sunday. You can view the videos in your browser on the Shalp! PC site. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the videos. These are not your typical YouTube amateur videos. Production values are high and the images visually exciting.

Shralp seems to "get" the potential of mobile video too. Right from the beginning, Shralp! has had a companion mobile web site and has offered mobile formatted videos for download on their main site. The mobile formats are .mp4 averaging 9 to 14 MB and 176x144 .3gp running from 2 to 3 MB. There are also higher quality formats for iPod, Zune and other media players.

Shralp's mobile site at shralp.com/mobile offers all 41 of the .3gp formatted Shralp vodcasts. Two or three megabytes is a large file for .3gp. Be sure to head the warning on Shralp's mobile site,

"Attention! If you don't have a flat rate - downloading might be expensive!"

Sideloading is a good alternative if your are on a metered plan or you have a carrier like Verizon that blocks it customers from streaming or downloading off-portal video.

Onboard covers the sport of snowboarding with images, news, results and event listings from the world of competitive snowboarding.