Missing your Olympics fix? Go mobile!

SOME PEOPLE have obviously gone Olympics mad and can't wait to get the latest updates on how the games are going. Just for those people, there's now the Mippin Olympic channel.

What Mippin has done has been to aggregate 30 major sites from worldwide sources - including AOL, BBC, CNN, Google, NBC, Reuters,and Yahoo – and present them all on a mobile handset friendly basis.

The sites allegedly offer video footage as well as text based news but the INQ couldn't actually find any video to check this out.

The whole point is, of course, to showcase Mippin'stechnology which it claims "uses Web 2.0 tools to make accessing interactive content on mobile phones painless."

The company maintains its approach is quicker than merely going to traditional URLs and crossing your fingers.

Mippin says it's also easier to implement than using mobile widgets, plus the service is available via any mobile phone's browser.

The trick is to point your phone's browser at www.mippin.com so Mippin can determine your handset and phone type and then to register.

Registering can take quite a while so be patient.

Once you've done that, the link to the Olympics channel should be highly visible. If not type http://www.mippin.com/olympics into your phone's browser.

Mippin reckons that serious numbers of mobile internet surfers (7.2 per cent of all mobile internet users in the UK) will follow the Olympics this way.

Given the recent survey that found handset owners continue to use their phones while in the lav, this gives new meaning to being glued to the screen.µ