Review: Webwag Mobile
Score:
41%
Ewan takes a look at 'a new Internet experience' on his smartphone, in this case Webwag Mobile, from the Nokia Ovi Store. A service aggregator, this experience may well be a new one, but the clunkiness of the user interface and poor use of the information entered means that it's not an experience anyone's likely to enjoy or come back to...
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Webwag popped up in the “new app” section of the Ovi Store and, with a promise to make “the mobile internet easy”, I was intrigued to say the least.
Now I wish I hadn't bothered.
Open up this java-based application for the first time and you get taken through a setup wizard that has the smallest fonts in the world on display. Being asked for some favourite topics (although “news” and “politics” are rather coarse differentiators) and then for your town and country for weather and local news means that you can be up and running in short order. I'm less sure about being asked for an email address and account password, and then my Twitter details before I've even seen what's on offer. Thankfully they were easily skipped over.
And into the main screen of Webwag, which is pretty nice and easy to understand. There are largish icons along the screen, including helpful links to The New York Times (err, I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland... can I not have something more appropriate after the set-up wizard gets my location?) and Google News. This at least does attempt to call up local news, but is now convinced I'm in New York.
Carrying on through the desktop, there's space to add post-it notes to yourself. This isn't quick, with a long animation of the note being zoomed into before you can type, and even then it takes up a tiny space in the centre of the screen and does... nothing else.
While it's obvious what Webwag is trying to do, the operative word there is 'try'. This is a nice idea for an application, but putting together mobile websites for quick and easy access is, in my book, a function of the bookmarks in the web browser, not a quirky and slow java interface. You could easily make an argument that there is benefit in collecting these with some widgets, but the widgets here have very little on offer beyond culling recent Twitter messages, the aforementioned weather window or your email inbox status.
Why this is being made available for S60 I don't know. The interface is geared to a much smaller screened phone that likely lacks a browser. Running this on the nHD screened S60 5th Edition devices transforms most operations on a touch device to an exercise in finger accuracy. It turns it into a frustrating experience rather than a smooth user interface. I don't see the point of apps like this when you already have the functionality on your device, but if you must have stuff like this clogging up the phone, look for something more polished and customisable, such as Snaptu (reviewed here).
Not sure I'd recommend Webwag in its current state.
– Ewan Spence
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at