Living the mobile lifestyle, truly, baby!

So I was up in Bolton with my other half over the bank holiday weekend. We left Bolton in late morning and hit the motorway and immediately hit some really annoying driving conditions. Think rain, think blurring windscreen wipers, think poor visibility mixed with the desire to maintain 70mph speeds.

Very quickly I reckoned it was getting crazy. We got about 50 miles before I cracked.

“Have a look for a decent pub and let’s get lunch,” I asked Hetty, nodding to the Nokia E90.

She picked it up and Googled. If that didn’t work I was about to recommend she do a Texperts or AQA.

“Look for something in or around Stafford,” I said, as we passed the ’12 miles to Stafford’ sign and the rain continued to beat down on the windscreen.

Within a few seconds she’d located The Holly Bush Pub in a little place by the name of Salt, just a mile or two outside Stafford.

She looked up a few reviews. All good. Excellent. She programmed the address into the Sat Nav and bish, bash, bosh… we arrived.

I don’t normally do this sort of thing because I have real problems with shit service. I don’t like going somewhere and being thoroughly disappointed. I’d rather go to Pizza Express, for example, because I know that the experience will be good. I was satisfied that we’d been able to establish the quality of the place thanks to a few reviews and details of various awards. Also, thanks to some good consumer reviews, we knew to expect it to be busy — and that it wasn’t worth phoning ahead to book a table because they operate on a first-come-first-served basis.

Thankfully we were early and when we arrived there was still space.

It was brilliant living la vida loca thanks to the mobile internet.

It’s still not there, though. We had to go hunting and the information wasn’t aggregated for easy decision making. We had to do the aggregation ourselves and the sites we looked at wouldn’t know a mobile browser if it arrived on their doorstep and slapped them with a wet kipper. And it wasn’t an end-to-end inclusive experience. For example, we had to get the post code from the web browser into the sat nav system by — GASP — doing it manually.

Inerestingly, nothing ELSE popped up. The Holly Bush was the first and only result we found easily.