I had a note from Shawn McCollum of Wampad to let me know about their mobile service which is garnering quite a bit of attention from a range of quarters. It’s billed as the (mobile) internet speed dial and is quite simply a pull-down box with an array of search options. (Witness my rather amateur screenshot using my Apple iSight on the left)
The major plus offered by Wampad is that there’s a heck of a lot at your fingertips. When you’re on a mobile, it’s often a bit of an arse to make some queries, particularly if you’re having to faff about visiting full-size websites before making your query. So, if you put Wampad in your mobile browser favourites, you’re then one-stop away from querying the usual suspects (google, yahoo, msn) as well as news, shopping, stocks, technorati, imdb, myspace, msn spaces, xanga, flickr, upcoming.org, horoscopes, weather, lottery, movies, flights, wikipedia and wiktionary.
The spelling of W A M P A D, by the way, is really, really simple to type with a mobile keyboard. The arrangement of letters mean that you only need tap 6 times to enter the domain name. Smart.
There’s another search feature called Profiles, explained on the site, thus: –
This is a future enhancement to show a little bit of what’s coming to Wampad. Wampad will eventually allow you to create a login and with that the ability to make a public profile. With this Profile you will be able to add links to your information online like you myspace page, flickr site or just about anything else.
With a fair wind, I could see this being rather popular. I quite like the concept of the local deli putting its Wampad ID on a poster in the shop so that if you ever need the deli’s details, you just whack them into Wampad to get the information. Far more elegant on a mobile than having to do multiple searches through Google. In fact it’s a heck of a lot more elegant and a lot more powerful than sending copious text message queries.
So, check it out on your mobile browser at www.wampad.com and add it to your favourites. (It’ll also work perfectly fine from your desktop). The next time you’re overcome with wanting to query technorati or search flickr, throw up Wampad and give it a go!