As one of the tech leads in the biggest content-selling company in France (and well established in america), I can only confirm that we HATE Novarra. Their blabla is totally lies. Everybody in the mobile web industry hates them. Because of them, we loose 10s of hours trying to bypass their ugly transcoders. We want to have the freedom to name our wapsite as we wish, not with .mobi or other long names.
We produce wapsites optimised for every device, since we have our own handset database with all the properties of phones (useragents, formats supported, screen sizes, etc.); Novarra is breaking them badly. They are especially bad with CSS : they strip half of the CSS, making sites totally buggy (like an input in which you cannot enter any character anymore, or such bugs).
We had to search on the web in order to discover that they started transcoding sites on Verizon handsets without letting us know.
I still don’t understand why they don’t do it properly = check the markup we send, and « optimise » it only if it’s NOT WML or XHTML-MP.
It would be so much simpler that playing with headers and screwing up all sites.. there are specific mobile markups, so why the hell aren’t they checking if we use them ?
Silly Novarra, I hate you
Thomas
cf. http://mobilesoapbox.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/transcoding-the-truth
