I’ve been lurking in a lot more corners of the blogosphere of late, thanks to the almost-wonderful OnSpeed Mobile. As a result, any dead time – mainly on the train in my case – has become blog time, and I can easily check out the Bloggers4Labour what’s new page, and thence on to hundreds of articles.

OnSpeed is a little browser program you download to your smartphone, and which connects to OnSpeed’s clever internet proxy servers to surf the web. Once you’re connected, all requested pages and images are compressed before they’re sent to you, dramatically speeding up your internet connection, and crucially, using up less of the precious megabytes that you get with your contract.

I use a HTC Magician touchscreen smartphone on GPRS (sold by Vodafone as a VPA Compact), which has a nice big screen for reading posts, and handwriting recognition for writing comments, whilst not being so large that I look too geeky in public (I hope).

The downsides are legion, and it’s had me really cursing it (and considering whether to get my £25 back on the 14 day guarantee). It’s a truly horrendous piece of software (though this may be due to having to develop it to work on any phone, not just smartphones like mine): Clunky start-up, terrible browser functionality (compared to my normal Internet Explorer for Pocket PC), fiddly form filling, confusing error messages, incompatibility with some sites, bad page layout options, occasional cacheing of word verification images (not handy when trying to comment), and a tendency to compound the already regular crashes of my wobbly Microsoft phone.

However, it *does* actually let you read and comment on blogs, which is something I just couldn’t do without it. I can now read at the blistering speed of normal landline dial-up (anyone remember that?). As anything slower is just unworkable for blogs, flitting back and forth through posts, links and comments, this make it viable for the first time. The smaller file sizes make it work a lot cheaper too.

If you’d like to try it out (with a 14 day money back, which you might well want to use) , you too can do so at www.onspeedmobile.com

And no, this wasn’t posted from my phone – I’m not *that* keen!