Redmond, Washington — Microsoft on Wednesday gave a sneak preview of its revamped MSN Mobile homepage optimized for smartphone site at OMMA Mobile 2010 conference in New York. The refurbished page set to go live Thursday features a cleaner, more streamlined layout on a white background and tight integration with Bing and other Microsoft properties.
According to Microsoft general manager for mobile advertising Charles Johnson, during a keynote address on a multi-screen marketing, said the improved MSN site is equipped for mobile devices with full HTML browsers.
The redesigned mobile homepage is accessible on a variety of devices and browsers, including Safari on iPhone and Android, apart from the excellent Opera Mobile 10 and Skyfire third-party browsers.
The announcement comes barely two months after the relaunch of MSN on the desktop and Johnson emphasized that the aim is to give the site a streamlined design and deep integration with services such as Bing and other platforms.
The new page boasts a prominent Bing search box across the top of the page are customizable tabs linking to MSN partner sites like MSNBC and Fox Sports and other content areas including entertainment and weather and stock quotes. Microsoft says the redesign is not merely cosmetic, but also provides faster loading of pages.
“The first thing you may notice is that the new MSN Mobile homepage shares the same look and feel of the MSN homepage we launched in March,” Farhana Ahmad and Darrin Eide, members of the MSN Mobile Program Management team, wrote in a May 13 posting on the MSN Blog. “What you do not see in the picture, although it is there, is that the design is optimized for mobile devices and the performance improvements make the page really, really fast to download.”
Explaining on the usability, they wrote, “We have incorporated the top content into above-the-fold tabs that remember what you were looking at when you come back.” Microsoft also expanded the homepage’s number of deep navigation links threefold to 30, and the new interface provides one-click access to Bing, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. Bing and its various search features, such as auto-suggest, have been deeply baked into the new homepage’s interface.
Also, in keeping with the Web’s wholehearted trend of everything social-networking related, the MSN homepage redesign integrated user feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live, along with a TrendWatch feature itemizing the most-Tweeted daily topics on Twitter.
On the advertising level, MSN is keeping a single prominent display unit on MSN Mobile to help ensure that brands get high-profile display to drive awareness and engagement. The simulation of the page showed an Infiniti ad in the lower middle of the screen, but there is no designated sponsor for the relaunch of the mobile site Thursday.
While the new mobile home page will be available on any device with an HTML browser, full access to content will initially roll out on platforms including iPhone, Android, Opera 9.5 on Windows Mobile and Palm’s webOS.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo find themselves stuck up in Web battle on a number of issues with Google, which currently leads the search-engine market in both the United States and internationally. Despite a search-and-advertising deal between Microsoft and Yahoo struck last summer, which will see Microsoft’s Bing power back-end search on Yahoo’s sites while Yahoo takes over both companies’ worldwide salesforce duties, Google continues to hold a substantial market-share lead over even the combined companies.