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dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi domain - the first and only Internet address designed specifically for mobile phones - today announced its evaluation of the mobile readiness of the 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

Using a list generated by Alexa® Internet on January 23, 2007, dotMobi evaluated the the most visited sites using http://ready.mobi, a unique testing tool produced by dotMobi that incorporates industry standards set by the W3C consortium and key investors including Ericsson, Microsoft and Nokia.

The tool at http://ready.mobi simulates a mobile device and accessed each of the top 100's PC-based web page and its .mobi (or other mobile) address, if applicable. The report follows a stringent assessment, and scores each site from one (least mobile ready) to five (most mobile ready).

According to this scale, the top 10 mobile ready sites are Google.com, WashingtonPost.com, Ask.com, Yahoo.com Flickr.com, Live.com, Facebook.com, Overstock.com, Weather.com and USA Today.com. Only three of the top 10 most popular Web sites - Yahoo, Google and Facebook - scored greater than a three out of five on the Mobile Ready Report.

Overall, sites that used a .mobi address tended to score well because they generally followed the dotMobi standards and best practices to ensure an optimal mobile experience.

The report indicated that many of the otherwise top web sites are not optimized for easy mobile viewing by consumers. These top 100 sites averaged a score of 1.3 out of five, illustrating the need for organizations to duplicate, for mobile phone users, the high-quality content they provide on their PC-based web sites. On average, tested sites cost a hefty $1.50 and took almost 40 seconds per page to load.

Consumer research consistently shows that a site's page structure, appearance, download cost and download speed are primary reasons why users avoid accessing the web on their mobile phone. Further, with more than four mobile phones for every one PC that's sold globally, more and more consumers are accessing the internet via their mobile phones.

"There's plenty of room for improvement because the mobile internet is still developing," said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. "The results indicate that consumers will most likely not have a good experience when they want to view their favorite sites from a mobile phone. The .mobi domain provides a viable, easy-to-manage platform for even the most popular sites to optimize their content for mobile phones."

To view the top 100 sites with their http://ready.mobi score in detail visit, http://pc.mtld.mobi/mobilenet/Top100.htm.

The tests performed in this evaluation can be repeated for these top sites and any others using the publicly accessible test at http://ready.mobi.

Related topics: DNS, Domain Registries, Mobile, Top-Level Domains