Mobile observations

[prog]

The bus was late yesterday, so while I clutched my umbrella in the rain, I pulled out my cellphone and (as I am wont to do lately) used it to dink around online. It may be somewhat true that the mobile web of 2005 -- the useable parts of it, anyway -- is like the wired web of 1993. I explored T-Mobile's "What's New" page, which reminded me of the old NCSA Mosaic page, though I knew that it wasn't quite the same; I'm sure there's various kinds of payola at play in the T-Mobile case.

Saw that Amazon had a link there. OK, the bus wasn't here, and there was a DVD I had been meaning to pre-order; why not. (Three guesses what it was, given the one movie I have been crowing about for the last month. (It rhymes with "Rhymer".))

Was expecting to find a slow-loading, graphics-intensive monstrosity as befit its behemoth mother-site. Not so: the pages were not just text-only but extremely austere, devoid of flavor-text, with everything I needed to read, click or type into on the first screenful of each page. I had found my DVD's page within a minute, and had it in my shipping queue a minute later. (It uses OneClick™®©☺ to process the order.)

Someone at Amazon is paying attention to how this stuff is supposed to work. Good for them! Again, though, I wonder if anyone else is using this service... I continue to have the for science excuse.

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On the bus I had no book to read, and it was too crowded for laptopping, so explored the sad, sad world of WAP-based games. Granted, some look a little interesting; there's a competitive resource-management game I could see myself playing in secret while sitting in the back of Social Studies, were I 20 years younger and very bored. (I peeked into the lobby, and saw that it was indeed full of children. They'd have to be damn nerdy kids in order to appreciate this game, though, so I silently smiled my blessings upon them before leaving them to their fun.)

But most of the games really seem to have no clue. Yesterday's finds included a trivia game that was smart enough to know how many other players were involved (unless it was lying), but stupid enough to actually ask me to keep manually reloading the page over and over while waiting for the other players to catch up. Wow. (I know that WAP can do auto-refresh, if only crudely; that's how that chat lobby worked.)

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

It's funny that amazon is so good about keeping a clean usable interface for tiny wireless use, when the normal screen is so cluttered and full of drek.