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Onspeed Mobile
Price: £19.99 inc VAT

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 13/04/2006
Featured in magazine:
Issue 133
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Onspeed
Tel: 0870 383 0101
Web Address: www.onspeedmobile.com


Standard mobile phones, with their small screens and number pads, are great for making calls and sending text messages. Try to use them to surf the web though and you'll be frustrated, as websites grind to a halt and service costs soar. But now, the people who sped up our dial-up connections with Onspeed have turned their attention to the humblest of mobile phones. By reformatting the sites you request for the small screen before they're sent to you, Onspeed Mobile claims it can speed up your web access and shrink your phone bills.

Features
Onspeed Mobile is basically a different browser you have to download onto your phone – it works in Java so will operate with most modern mobiles. All requests for pages go through a special server, which downloads the page and reformats it to ensure the best performance on your phone, both in terms of how you view it and how quickly it's sent. For example, it'll resize images to the kind of scale your phone can manage, significantly reducing the download time and providing a better viewing experience.

Performance
As a preliminary test we surfed around a handful of sites with Onspeed Mobile switched on. When we logged off the phone told us that we'd downloaded just over 300KB of data. Turning Onspeed Mobile off and heading through our phone's standard browser we started the process again. We only made it to the first of the sites we had previously surfed around, which was formatted so badly that it was unreadable. Checking on the bandwidth used, it turned out that we'd already used up over 150KB of data – almost half the amount we'd used with Onspeed – without managing to get anywhere. Surfing through to other sites produced similar results. Of course, it's still not what we're used to on our desktop computers, but it's a vast improvement.

Ease of use
The software itself is very simple – a single menu includes options for typing in web addresses and storing them as bookmarks, and it intelligently auto-suggests the site you're currently viewing if you choose to add a new site to your list. If there's any issue with ease of use it probably comes from your phone's keypad and how easy it makes it to input new web addresses and so on.

Value for money
The £19.99 per year asking price seems fair when you consider that it's going to improve the way you spend your time online – for many users it's probably less than they spend on a month's worth of calls and contract. However, people who use the internet on their mobiles already will also save money on data charges, because the Onspeed servers absorb requests for big bandwidth-hogging sites and spit them out leaner and meaner.

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