Vehix Mobile

I kept seeing commercials on TV saying Vehix has a mobile version. I went and poked at it however and had some issues. First off was that my N95 brought up the full web version. I’ve seen a bunch of discussions online saying things like “if the user is on a device with a full browser or using Opera Mini of course they want the full version.” From expert users sometimes even. That’s just stupid. I’m pretty sure the problem was just that the platform Vehix used just didn’t recognize the N95 But in case someone made the explicit decision to return the full version to Webkit on the N series, you were wrong. Definitely in the state it’s in now.

One of the major problems is that there’s no actual link over to the mobile version if you end up on the desktop version by mistake. I searched around on the web and didn’t find any mention of it. So I pulled on Firefox on my desktop where I have a bunch of mobile user agents saved in modify headers. The first two user agents I tried resulted in an “unsupported browser” error page. Well, that also is just dumb when you’re dealing with mobile. Seriously, if you’re going to do things all half-assed, at least allow your users to pick the right version manually if they should happen to understand what’s going on. Throwing up an error page and suggesting a bunch of desktop browsers to be using instead, that’s just poor form.

Turns out the mobile version is at http://mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.vehix.com/ if you want to check it out. Once you can get there it really is a pretty nice mobile site. The layout is clean, selection options were a bit funky at times but workable, and it seemed like a perfectly practical site. My car is holding its resale value very nicely, that’s always great to see. Can’t really thank Vehix for that, but it put me in a good mood at least.