Wireless carrier Sprint has launched Sprint Web, a next-generation mobile Web browsing platform that tailors content based on users' online mobile behavior.

Sprint Web has an adaptive homepage that delivers content based on the customer's past usage, along with direct access to mobile search from Google Inc. This enhancement is automatic for Sprint customers who have Web-enabled mobile phones and requires no additional action on their part.

"We are increasingly seeing people going to the mobile Internet on their phones to buy ringtones and wallpapers and typical data usage, but they're also typing in the URLs of Internet sites they want to visit," said Emmy Anderson, an Austin, TX-based spokeswoman for Sprint. "As people are getting more used to the data applications on their phones, we're trying to make that experience as easy and user-friendly as possible."

The new Sprint Web home page uses technology by ChangingWorlds, a provider of mobile Internet personalization and content discovery technologies, to provide each customer with targeted, relevant mobile content. This makes each customer's Sprint Web home page unique, depending on their interests.

For example, if a customer continually goes to sports links, the top sports stories will be featured.

The goal of the platform is to let customers to quickly get information related to what sites they search for and visit most often, making it easier to navigate the Internet on their phones and reducing the time they spend looking for content.

"Sprint is making the Web on the mobile phone mirror the PC experience," Ms. Anderson said. "It includes features that people are used to, such as news and weather, but it also has a Google search feature and sites that you've visited in the past."

To access Sprint Web, customers click the Web icon on the main menu of their phone.

Sprint Web also gives customers direct access from the home page to Google search, so customers can get relevant open Internet results in a format they're used to seeing on their computer screens.

Google is now the default mobile search provider for open Internet search on Sprint phones with Sprint Web. To access Google search on these phones, customers click the Web icon on the main menu of their phone and enter a term into the search box on the new Sprint Web homepage.

Sprint Web is available today on more than 40 Sprint phones, including RAZR2 by Motorola, Centro by Palm, Rumor by LG, Upstage by Samsung and Katana DLX by Sanyo.

Sprint plans to make Sprint Web available on virtually all Web-capable Sprint feature phones over the coming weeks.

"We definitely think that this is breaking new ground," Ms. Anderson said. "Sprint was at the forefront of letting wireless customers access the open Internet, and we're the first carrier to have a personalized mobile homepage."

The introduction of Sprint Web follows Sprint's launch earlier this year of Open Web, a more PC-like open Internet browsing experience on its phones, which provides more user-friendly renderings of Internet sites, even those not optimized for mobile devices.

"Instead of a jumble of links, our customers will see open Internet pages that have been reformatted to fit the mobile screen," Ms. Anderson said.

Sprint Web and Google search are available at no additional charge to Sprint data subscribers, including customers subscribing to Everything plans such as the $99 Simply Everything plan, Talk/Message/Data Share plans and data packs. Standard data usage charges apply for customers without a data subscription.

Sprint has employed an open Internet approach since first launching the Wireless Web on its phones in 2001.

Through relationships with third parties, dozens of non-Sprint branded applications, games and other digital media operate on the Sprint network.

Sprint will hold its eighth annual Application Developer Conference later this year to provide third-party developers with tools and resources for creating innovative products and services for Sprint customers.

Sprint Nextel claims that it was serving nearly 53 million customers at the end of the first quarter 2008.
Sprint is a member of the Open Handset Alliance, along with more than 30 other participating companies, to support Google's free and open mobile applications platform Android.

"You've heard a lot of talk about open and what it means, and for us it means letting people do what they want to with their phone," Ms. Anderson said. "One of the challenges in the U.S. has been taking that mobile Internet access and making it work in a way that's useful to the customer.

"Sprint has taken its high-speed mobile broadband network and created a mobile Internet experience that's intuitive and easy to use, and we will continue with enhancements and upgrades to Sprint Web going forward," she said.