In a move that will bring them up to par with their WP.com rival, Blogger (aka blog*spot) is beta testing mobile layouts which should help the platform appeal more to those sporting a smartphone.
[W]e are excited to announce our first launch of mobile templates! Initially available as opt-in functionality on Blogger in Draft, mobile templates will re-format your blogs for smartphones to enhance your readers’ viewing experience. In order to activate mobile templates, simply go to Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab, enable the mobile template option and then save settings. […]We are initially supporting 6 variants of the Simple template and 6 variants of the Awesome template. If you have used one of these 12 templates through our Template Designer, your mobile view will be rendered in the same style as your desktop view (other template variants will be rendered as Simple). (Blogger In Draft Blog)
As a bonus, BlogSpot fans will also be able to insert ads (via Adsense) into their mobile sites, which means that they will be able to generate revenue regardless whether a reader is viewing their site upon a smartphone or notebook.
Users can even comment from their mobile device, and even preview comments before posting (although the preview part seems to be slightly buggy during my tests).
The mobile view only works for webkit based browsers (i.e. mobile Safari and mobile Chrome) so if you are using a Windows Phone 7 device or even Opera mini you are unfortunately out of luck.
BlogSpot fans can activate this feature by visiting draft.blogger.com (Google’s eternal beta site for Blogger) and this latest feature should help the platform compete against WP.com, Posterous and the ever popular Tumblr.
(Hat Tip: Technology Cloud for contacting me about this).
