Mobile Website Fastpages.com Is NOT Fast
November 26th, 2007 MobileFreak
We recently received multiple emails from people speaking highly of an all-in-one informational mobile website for people on the go. Dubbed Fastpages, the service claims to be a source of all types of information for the busy traveler.
In fact, here’s what Chris Chilvers had to say about it:
Catch a plane, check an airfare, find a hotel, monitor the traffic, handle an emergency, view an Amber Alert or locate a recipe. Then, watch your animated weather, scan a map, read any newspaper in the world, research anything and find virtually everything. All very fast, free and easy. Just enter www.thefastpages.com into your mobile browser and off you go.
While all this sounds useful, the problem is that of the three times I tried accessing the site, it returned an http 404 error (page not found) twice!
Incredibly frustrating. Obviously, this mobile website has a long way to go before I can recommend it to anyone.
Entry Filed under: Avoid
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Dear MobileFreak,
We have thousands of page views a month and have never received an email as to a 404 error. I don’t doubt there may be a few errors out of the many thousands of mobile friendly websites and thousands of vital phone numbers we have tested & listed.
Yes, there may be problems with older cell phones where accessing the web was a second thought for manufactures. We do work very well on; iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Q’s, N95, Treo, Blackjacks, Palm and all the newer smartphones.
It is disheartening you never mentioned the 9,998 websites that work great and those your readers would appreciate knowing about. Please let us know what type of smartphone you own and the sites that gave you errors so we may fix them.
What is more obvious is that for some reason you seem to have missed a lot. I strongly doubt that you really tested out the power of this site or took notice of the many innovations that are present.
As for fast, well, there is no signing-in, no passwords required, no downloading, no ads, and no typing in of thousands of difficult web addresses and hard to find phone numbers and rarely any typing at all! Oh, and no cutesy name, just TheFastPages.com.
If you would go to our Blackberry/iPhone Simulator at: http://www.tfpadmin.com/demoroom.html you might notice many exceptional features and see the massive available information and speed for yourself.
One paragraph does not address any accomplishments we have worked so hard at.
Anyway, I guess bad press is better than no press and we will be glad to let the public see for themselves. We never met a mobile user who didn’t want our free site on their smartphone. Well, I guess one.
We update daily, and any recommendation or error received from the public is processed immediately.
Finally, we would like to propose a dual. We will be glad to meet you at high noon and you choose whatever mobile search or information website you wish and we will see once and for all who the fastest mobile gunslinger is. See our blogspot for the rules and final results. We look forward to your suggestions as to the time and place and your take on the rules. See you on Main St.
Mobile Simulator (viewed on computer): http://www.tfpadmin.com/demoroom.html
Blog: http://www.thefastpages.blogspot.com
Thanks,
Chris Chilvers, Founder/CEO
The Fast Pages
Thanks for the great response Chris. First let me say that your passion for your work is fantastic.
I was honestly excited to check out FastPages, and still believe today that it can be successful. At the same time, I always strive to give our readers the best information possible, and will share my experience with whatever site we review, good or bad. I understand every site can have errors at times but this appeared to be a trend, and I called it like I saw it.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree that we should let the public decide for themselves, and I would be more than happy to take on your challenge of a duel!! In fact, I will be asking our readers what mobile site we should match yours up against. Looking forward to it Chris!
Weird, I went to the site, (http://thefastpages.com) and it worked fine for me on Sprint Moto RAZR. It did redirect me to http://www.mytfp.net
-Andrew
PS When are the t-shirts being mailed out for the winners of the site submission contest?
Andrew – The 404 errors I saw were from a regular version of Firefox, which I use before testing mobile sites on a Moto RAZR and a Blackberry 8830.
You should have received your shirt in late September/early October. We received confirmation from most others that they received their shirts, so I will follow up with you directly.
Actually this is a pretty good site.
Loads of good information all aimed at the mobile device, without the fear of some multinational corporations ‘Text message spamming’ or some other marketing campaign I would not voluntarily like to be on to use the site.