Pricecheck.at - The Mobile Price Checking Service

We've touched on mobile web development in the past couple of posts. It's an exciting new area which offers a huge potential for growth as more people get online with their mobile phones. Well rather than just talk about it, we thought we'd give it a go, and Pricecheck.at is the result. Imagine the scenario... You're on your way back from work when you happen to walk past a window with a big sign that says, 'Sale today only! Nintendo Wii Console just £190!'. The shop is closing in 20 minutes so you don't have chance to get home and check the latest prices available online. Luckily you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, so you quickly call up pricecheck.at, enter 'Nintendo Wii Console', and with the single click of a button you get a list of prices for the Nintendo Wii, and where it's available online. It's a good job you did too, as it turns out that you can in fact get a brand new console online from game.co.uk for just £179.99. You are in PC World and you want to buy a brand new digital camera. You'd checked prices on the Internet before you left, but the sales assistant recommends a model you hadn't considered. You think it seems perfect, but you don't want to buy it from the first place you find, and would rather check the price available online first. The problem is PC World is about 10 miles from your house, so going home first is a bit of a mission, especially with the price of petrol these days. So you call up pricecheck.at, enter 'Canon IXUS 75 Digital Camera' and click 'Check Price'. You're then presented with 12 different prices for where the same model is available online. As it happens the price available from PC World is the same as the cheapest price available elsewhere, in this case either Curry's or Amazon Marketplace, all three offering the camera for £129.99. But had you been in Jessops this service would have been invaluable, as they list the camera for £159. So you would have saved yourself £30 + a lot of trouble finding out. People have been benefiting from price comparision services on their PC's for years, with sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner becoming incredibly popular, but the Pricecheck.at service packages up all this functionality and makes it available to users on their mobile phones when they are actually out and about shopping in the real world as a last check to do before buying anything in a shop. Another great example of when the Pricecheck service could really come into it's own is in the huge market of mobile phones themselves! A friend of mine just got stung when he mistakenly signed up for an 18 month mobile phone contract which it turned out he didn't want. Despite taking the phone back to the shop just 3 hours after he bought it, they wouldn't let him get out of his contract and he was completely committed to paying off the 18 months contract! There is apparently NO cooling off period when buying a mobile phone in store which I was very surprised about... However this makes a service like Pricecheck.at incredibly useful. A quick search on Pricecheck.at for the 'Sony ericsson K850i on the O2 Network' reveals an incredible 163 prices, with mobiles.co.uk being the cheapest at just £15! Now presumably this is a contract arrangement, but still it gives you a good indication of what's available online, and may just stop you signing up to a cast iron instore contract, when you can get it cheaper online. These are just a few of the scenarios that sprung to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of other situations where being able to access a price comparision service, while on the move, could prove to be immensely useful. Pricecheck.at also offers a mobile friendly web directory, which is a list of sites that are particularly aimed at working well on mobile devices. You'd be surprised how much on the Internet simply isn't accessible from a mobile device. You can also browse the site for products and prices. The site is currently just a basic service, but if it proves popular we plan to expand and improve the browsing and shopping service to make it more user friendly and useful for mobile shoppers. It's a tricky balancing act between attractive design, and accessibility on as wide a range of platforms as possible. I'd welcome any feedback or comments about the site and the ethos behind it. Also if you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, let me know how Pricecheck.at looks on your phone.