The first round of testing that Karlyn performed was a resounding… well, fail to be honest. I received a phone call bright and early one morning with the results of Karlyn’s testing.
To be honest it just didn’t work for her. After a fairly disappointed chat we figured out what the problem was – is – might be?
Our testing has been done with WI-Fi and with iphone 3gs’s, and whenever we have done tests they are under lab conditions with the watchful eye of Petra or myself. Outwith those lab conditions it turns out that the world of mobile and web apps is a bit fraught.
The main issue was getting a consistent and reliable signal at 3g – without this our application doesn’t work so well. This is probably true of almost all mobile applications that need an internet connection but particularly for us as we are getting back data from a couple of sources and presenting it. One web service call and another direct HTTP connection but that is for each tile, so we are basically sending a whole lot of HTTP requests and over GPRS this is not so good.
We came up with a couple of ideas on how to solve this – 1) try the Google Maps 3 API which is a little more mobile centric 2) some caching