eBay

eBay Mobile Posted in Lifestyle on 10 Jul 2008

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield

User’s rating: (34 votes, average: 3.76 out of 5)  Loading ...

Editor’s rating:

eBay, like several other big web sites with complex pages, is almost unusable on the iPhone because of the sheer amount of zooming in and panning around needed in order to see the things needed to carry out your ‘business’. Thankfully, there’s an iPhone-optimised version of eBay, with access to the same data but with much lower demands on screen real estate and with everything sized properly. You’d think that was enough, wouldn’t you?

Not for the iPhone fans at eBay corporation, who have gone one step further and created a native iPhone eBay client. This talks directly to eBay’s servers without needing Safari to interpret everything and,as a result, is just about the slickest and fastest eBay experience you’ll ever see on a mobile device.

The home screen for eBay Mobile sets the scene, acting as a control panel. Numbers in any box represent auction action – things you’re buying or selling, etc. Tap on any of these boxes and you’re taken straight to the relevant buying/selling summary screen, each of which appears as a handy illustrated list that can be dragged up and down, Safari-style. eBay does a spectacular job of sticking to the iPhone application style guide and as a result feels more like a built-in app than an add-on. As you’d expect, eBay Mobile also remembers your password, saving you having to re-enter this regularly, as you would if you were using a web-based view of eBay.

Searching for items to buy is especially slick, often being quicker than when using the full eBay site on your PC or Mac. An item’s
description is shown in a Safari-style draggable graphical window, in which you can zoom in and out of photos and text using multi-touch gestures. Finally, bidding on an item is as easy as tapping on ‘Place bid’.

eBay Mobile’s only flaw is that it doesn’t remember its context when you switch to another application on your iPhone. Because it’s a third party application, there’s no way for it to exist in the background and so you’re reliant on it remembering ‘where you’d got to’, perhaps in the middle of a complex search. Maybe context-saving will be part of a future update. Also worth adding by eBay Mobile’s developers are more search refining options – currently you can only opt to filter by category and sort the full match list according to various criteria -restricting searches to a particular price bracket would be very useful indeed.