BiziBB

Dear Randy
Given FT's / HOM's excellent technology record, experience and willingness to look at continual improvements to the FT experience, can you enlighten us on your 'house' impressions of running mobile.flyertalk.com on your iPhone browser?

I imagine a few people in your house have iPhones by now and hopefully some nice fast connections.

In addition, iPhone applications for FFPs, maybe even KVS and ExpertFlyer could make iPhones useful as something more than a basic browser & phone.

I am just wondering if there is a possibility improvements to the mobile FlyerTalk - perhaps some functionality from the forum software, in the future?

Thanks for any feedback, news or your perspective.
(PS. Yes, I got sucked into the Apple Store today)
Warm regards
The BBs

itsaboutthejourney

I happen to know that Randy is an iPhone user himself, so I can only imagine he's doing what he can to advocate improvements for mobile users. ^

notsosmart

mobile.flyertalk.com is currently disabled...

I find that regular FT is fairly easy to read on an iPhone, but a pain to post to.

sbm12

mobile... is back, but harder to navigate than it used to be.

And the slow, painful march of technology steps on and on, oblivious to the rest of us...

Ajohn

I've been wanting a mobile flyertalk for the year now since I've had my iPhone and had no clear it was already here! I'm sure it's got limitations, but I for one am thrilled to be able to quickly browse over EDGE. Thanks everyone!

Mrp Alert

I completely disagree with you on this. The new mobile version runs like a dream on my LG Dare. I love the ability to skip to the last post in a thread and the quick tips that now pop up from time to time.

Mrp Alert

Wirelessly posted (FlyerTalk.com/wap is fun : BlackBerry8330/4.3.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

Omg. I was reading a trip report on my other toy, a BlackBerry Curve and almost had a heart attack! There are now photos inside FT Wireless?! Amazing! Are there are any other notable new features in the latest WAP upgrade? Was this upgrade installed only because Randy got a new toy for which old FT Wireless was underpowered . Your #5 most prolific WAP poster is impressed.

Randy Petersen

As you know, we did adopt a mobile.flyertalk.com at a very early age. When considered, we searched and compared and tried to pick the resource that seemed to be the most preferred and leading edge among anyone providing a gateway for mobile devices. That provider was wiForums.net which continues to this day to be our bridge. So, as you can probably appreciate we rely somewhat, well, actually totally on what type of benefits they have within their software for browsing online.

We were down the other day as we installed the latest version from wiForums.net and the new version on this end seems pretty good and as others have pointed out, includes the ability to click to the last page of a thread and as well, includes several different preferences, like shortcuts to various forums, etc.

I've only used what we have for FlyerTalk, so don't have any experiences with any other bridges, but if power users via mobile have any suggestions, i'm sure i'd be interested in hearing from you.

I know from inside this small company that almost everything we are building for new projects has an eye and an ear on how it might relate to a mobile user, so thanks for your continued interest in making sure we hear from our members on this.

Cheers,
Randy

bonoman

One suggestion I haven't seen and would like to add would be to include a link to mobile.flyertalk.com just below the standard browser link when sending out e-mail with links to subscribed/updated threads. I've noticed this with other forums/boards I'm on and its quite handy and fast.

itsaboutthejourney

Humm, almost a year passes and no FlyerTalk iPhone app...

At least I have Facebook, Twitter and SPG apps to keep me entertained.

Randy Petersen

Humm, almost a year and despite my request, "...but if power users via mobile have any suggestions, i'm sure i'd be interested in hearing from you." there have been no further posts with ideas as to what an iPhone app would do and offer. While you mention a few others, Facebook and Twitter are like posting to a personal blog, which FlyerTalk is not like. As well, with SPG, nice to see your point balance but not sure what the applicable counter on FlyerTalk might be for that. But we keep looking and researching and as of today, there is not any bulletin boards in travel similar in nature to FlyerTalk, i.e. Fodors, etc. which have iPhone apps. In fact, I noticed this post a few weeks ago and have been monitoring it. It's from a fairly popular Apple forum and you might notice that over a week and not a single reply to information regarding iPhone apps for bulletin boards.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=749907

There is something we've looked at but am sure while an app, that we want to force members to pony up the money to someone else. We've rather have something that made sense and was free. Here's that app is you want to look at it:
http://www.tapatalk.com/

But for most so far, just using the browser on the smart phones seems to work, though perhaps like you i'd like to see a cool app for vBulletin. So far in all their developers areas, there is noting that is being touted as the next big thing, other than specialized skins for mobile devices.

Anyway, we do keep our eyes and ears open and so far as noted, haven't seen and ideas posted by our members that would assist us in looking at and making the right move into this area.

Make sense?

Randy

bonoman

Any idea on adding mobile links for those who read our thread subscriptions on our WiMo devices all the time?

Gaucho100K

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.4; Series60/5.0 NokiaN97-3/10.2.012; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; en-us) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) WicKed/7.1.12344)

The mobile FT runs quite well on my Nokia N97.... Sure there are issues... I would like to be able to customize more things... post display order is on top of my list...

Alas, overall the mobile FT experience is a good one.

Non-NonRev

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE71-2/100.07.76; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0)

I concur that the current mobile FT is quite good. If people would only stop quoting 20 paragraphs of a previous post when replying, it would approach nirvana (although I do realize that the over-quoting is a FT-wide issue).

I do hope that Randy and HOM will recoginze that many FT mobile users use mobile devices other than Apple Corp. products, and I further hope that any future software development efforts will keep that fact in mind.

Randy Petersen

getting much better, still not the best but again, better than most with this new entry point:
m.flyertalk.com

Comments from members will assist in fine tuning this since it really is only a beta version.