Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.
First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.
It’s as easy as that!
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Comments
I think building a mobile site this way is a really bad approach I believe better results can be achieved by designing mobile first using media queries and CSS this way your site can scale from large screen devices to mobile with very little overhead.
Panels adds a lot of unnecessary overhead on the server PHP and MySQL resources wise.
You would get a better mobile site by using a theme like Omega which already provides you with the necessary media queries to adapt to different screen sizes.
I would also probably use the context module which should be lighter on resources panels. Mobile Tools can also be used the context module.
I firmly believe that site layout should stay in theme engine and people should not rely on contributed modules like panels for creating layout.
Otherwise I think mobile tools is an awesome module.