Saturday evening, over cheap Lastminute.com dinner at Quaglino’s, Louise and I were discussing which film we’d like to see afterwards. It wasn’t a late meal but for some reason there’s a dead zone in showing times between 20:30 and 23:00. I started looking things up on the Orange Wap site. I used a location search to find the nearest cinemas. Clicking through to a cinema gave me a list of films, which after one more click gave me a list of times. What I wanted was cinemas a) near me, b) showing one of the three films I wanted and c) showing them in the next hour. Surely this is an extremely common case? This should be a single click. I should be able to bookmark http://orange.multimedia/films/nowshowing/ and just get this list, location-aware. Instead I spent much of the meal clicking away, instead of laughing and making polite conversation.

I had an interesting conversation with Nick Hancock of Intelli-call on Tuesday about the thickness of the mobile client. Mobile services should, IMHO, be about shipping the tiny fraction of functionality which is genuinely useful in a mobile setting, everything else should be done through the web.

For Gmail this means I set up my account online, enter my details, but I can use my phone to check my inbox, read and write replies if I really need to. For RSS, this means I have an online feed configuration tool, and a mobile app which just pulls the latest from the feeds I have set to export to that profile. Of course, all configuration should be available on the mobile too, for that one time I really need to change the parameters. So, support the default case with the minimum amount of traffic, but allow flexibility when required. Sound familiar? You should already be doing this on your website.

It was Bluepulse that really got me thinking about this. Bluepulse is a Dashboard/Konfabulator-style widget environment for mobiles. I can make connected apps quickly and easily. With lovely Web 2.0 access to data Orange’s data about film showings and my current location I should be able to write a quick Bluepulse app that gives me what I want.

Wait, Orange don’t let me get near their film data and certainly not to my own location data.