Rated: 100% (4 votes)
Loading ...Mobile internet is rubbish
Alex Watson
I’ve just moved house, and my commute now involves having to take an overland train, rather than just jumping on the tube. This means wrestling with train timetables in order to work out when it’s best to leave work, and, as my new house is between two stations, figuring out which is best to go to. This is exactly the sort of task mobile internet should be great at. Unfortunately, it’s been a massive disappointment so far, on a par with an England World Cup campaign.
I’m on Orange and when load the phone’s browser, the first page you see is a total mess: a long list of links to stuff that is to good content what a bowl of Frosties is to a well balanced nutritious meal. I like surfing around randomly on the web as much as anyone, but the web on a phone should really be focussed on the practical and the local - do I really need a link to ‘Buff or Rough - Your Pics’ (presumably a shoddy Hot or Not rip off) before travel info? Who thought this up? Is Orange’s mobile web designed by a bunch of hormonal Nuts readers?
When you do get to the train time page, there is one neat touch (being able to click ‘locate me’ to get a list of nearby stations), but there’s no real way of storing a quick list of stations - a pain for me when I’ve got multiple options for the start and end of the journey. It’s also too tricky to get a map of the station surroundings up on screen. Worse, when you do manage to summon it, and try and plot a walking route to your destination, you’re told it will cost 35p per route. Brilliant, if there’s one thing I like more than a rubbish service, it’s paying tiny amounts of money for rubbish services. The whole process is made all the more horrible by the fact it’s horrendously slow (even when there’s full signal - to give you an idea, I’ve been trying to plan a journey while writing this post, and I’m five floors up in the air in Central London, and the phone is still sitting there… gradually…. doing…. sweet… FA….). Sometimes a button click will bring up the page reasonably quickly, while other times the browser will sit there… the spinning wheel spinning and nothing happening.
Madness has been defined as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time. That’s not madness, that’s exactly what the mobile web is like. People treat Steve Jobs like he’s a genius, but give the state of mobile phone internet, and how poorly it handles it’s no surprise that the iPhone, with its focus on mobile wep and maps has been rapturously received.
Horray, yet more reasion to not have a mobile.
I find it much more fun to get lost. I lost my way getting to Nottingham. Found some nice places.
Or go analogue and get a map.
The quest for decent mobile sites is an often fruitless and frustrating one! I’m on a blackberry Pearl, and O2. The O2 home page is full of the same sort of trash it would appear the Orange site is, it lasted about 1 minute as my default page.
One thing that is worth doing is grabbing a copy of Opera Mini, all content is filtered through Opera’s servers to better align to mobile use, which is great for site which haven’t thought about mobile use, although I find it makes worse the use of actual mobile sites, for which I stick to the inbuilt BB Browser.
One of the most cunning sites for mobile use I’ve found in Netvibes.com, one of the new bread of aggregator sites, which allows you to create a tab for mobile use, and presents them quite well on your mobile, worth checking out.
I hate all this convergence stuff. There are things that a phone should do (manage contacts and reminders, make calls and send text) and things a laptop should do (surf the internet, run other applications, play the odd game). So instead of a smartphone, I bought a smart phone (Samsung D830) and ignore the fact that it has a browser. To some extent it’s the fault of web designers and developers as we’ve had the possibility of targeted stylesheets for handheld devices for quite a while, but then we’ve also had print stylesheets and we’re still inundated with “Printable version” links.