Google Wireless Transcoder

[The PocketTV Team]

Google has recently created a new service called GWT (Google Wireless Transcoder), which is not yet officially announced and still in "beta" stage, but it works well and it is extremely useful to navigate the numerous websites that are not optimized for Mobile use.

To try it, point your device to:

http://google.com/gwt/n

and enter the URL that you want to transcode.

Then you can bookmark transcoded site in your Favorites, so that you don't have to type anything to access the transcoded site again.

The nice part is that once you are on a transcoded website, all the links that you will follow will be transcoded too. There is a link at the very bottom of the page that you can click to access the original, non-transcoded page.

This tool can also be used as a link in websites that are not optimized for Mobile viewing, i.e. you can include a link in your website to give access to the version transcoded by google, e.g. http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com to transcode the cnn.com website.

Once you enter a URL in http://google.com/gwt/n , you can see (in the address bar) the URL that you can use for direct access to the transcoded page.

Webmasters must be aware of one drawback, though: when people access their website through the google transcoder, they loose all information about the ip address and user agent accessing their site, since it is masked by the google transcoder. They might also loose information about the pages being accessed if google transcoder caches some pages.

Edit: apparently this transcoder was mentioned here before: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45833

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Great info thanks!

[The PocketTV Team]

remember that this is still a beta tool, and it has bugs.

sometimes it returns strange errors, and also it has problems following some particular types of links (e.g. links that involve redirects).

also it does not work with https urls.

but it is often useful when your mobile browser is incapable of formatting a site in a usable way.

[Cybrid]

This has been out for quite some time...I remember testing it and finding skweezer to be much more robust.

[Darius Wey]

Yup, it's been available for about a year, but still has a few rough edges.

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45833

[The PocketTV Team]

This has been out for quite some time...I remember testing it and finding skweezer to be much more robust.

what's the url for skweezer ?

[Darius Wey]

http://www.skweezer.net/

[The PocketTV Team]

http://www.skweezer.net/

thanks.

but skweezer does not work on any link (inside a skweezed document) that is redirected by a server. since this is a common occurence, it's quite a big problem... at least google wireless transcoder follows those links (it just looses the '#' part of the links).

also skweezer does not let you hide and expand table elements or large segments of a page.

[The PocketTV Team]

another onteresting thing to notice:

if you do a google search using http://google.com/xhtml , then all the retured links will automatically be transcoded by google wireless transcoder.

this is not the case if you use the similar http://google.com/pda

[The PocketTV Team]

Well, Google Wireless Transcoder is not as good as i thought.

On many websites, links just don't work at all (especially if they involve CGI with parameters), and forms (like search forms) also often don't work.

hopefully Google will resolve all those bugs some day!