Vodafone NZ – a closer look at the gateway changes

Posted on June 21, 2008 by Nick. Posted in Uncategorized.

My friend Jono and I had a closer look the other night at how Vodafone NZ’s changes affect our browsing experience.

I will not reproduce here what our first thoughts were; I will let you judge for yourselves. We chose two sites for our tests: asb.co.nz and tvnz.co.nz

Asb.co.nz was loaded over HTTPS and over HTTP.

This is asb.co.nz over HTTPS:

All’s good, the website looks exactly the way it is supposed to look like.

Now over HTTP. Boy oh boy!

So what went wrong? I believe a couple of things caused this tremendous change:

• The page was converted from HTML to WML so that it can be displayed on our non-full HTML compliant browser
• The request was not an HTTPS request therefore during the HTML to WML conversion Vodafone’s software injected those images at the top and changed the layout of the site.

Let’s just say that Asb’s website just happens to be complicated and therefore it looks bad after the conversion. One could say that it is Asb’s fault for not having a mobile version of the site. Well have a look at what happens when you browse to website that does have a mobile version of the site.

TVNZ portable – not that portable after Vodafone’s changes tho

Obviously this is not what TVNZ had in mind when they paid to develop a mobile version of their website. I will tell you what went wrong here:

• A request was made for the tvnz website. Normally the web application would detect the mobile agent and render the mobile version of the site.
• Vodafone on the other hand, loaded the website and re-rendered it to the mobile client adding their images at the top

This what it was supposed to be

Sadly, the non-optimized version of the site looks heaps better.

To get this last version loaded on our phone we simply chose to use a different APN. See my other post to learn more about this.

If this is what happens to a website, can you imagine what happens if you try to use a Java application to transfer data? Do keep in mind that java applications do not send user agent information over the air…

If I am wrong in my assumptions do let me know and I will update this post.

Cheers…

Get a Trackback link