Go to m.trademe.co.nz – even from your mac (or PC if you really must) browser.
It’s simple, stark even and light. A staggering 6.9k home page, versus 292kb for the www home page.
Forget about browsing any way but by search. Actually it is a really unfriendly place to just browse for stuff – but really good if you are monitoring an aucton, or you want to check out your current saved searches.
Here’s the product screen, stark again and tiny.
Note that last line – go to Trade Me to email the seller. I suppose there is no excuse not to just call the seller – unless you are in a pub and it’s 1130pm on a Friday. Loads of phones have email capability, so why not show me the email address? Or even give me the link to the full page with that phone number on it, so I can use my mobile browser or text it to myself?
The photos are scrolled one at a time – no preloading here. They are small but sufficient.
Finally the description page delivers all the text in a stream – which is perfect.
So overall it’s a fairly crippled experience, but a very light on for the vast majority on ridiculously expensive mobile data plans. I sense there is still some work to do around searching via category and placing auctions. With a phone in the camera you’d think that there is opportunity to make placing an auction simplicity itself…
Lance Wiggs 