The other day, I was desperately seeking information on the schedule and availability of tickets for a movie. I thought, checking the schedules on my iPhone would be better than calling the theater number (and then waiting in a long queue for someone to even pick up the phone). After all, iPhone features a full fledged web-browser!
Searched on Google for the web address of the theaters and as usual, the results page loaded extremely fast, about 0.16 second for the query and about 7-10 secs for the full page to load (incidentally the mobile version of Google home page takes much longer to load).
Then went on to individual Websites…
Adlabs Cinemas (Rating – 1/2 star): Even the low bandwidth version takes extremely long to load. The drop down selection doesn’t work. Very mobile unfriendly with heavy use of images. The only saving grace, I got the phone numbers of the theater call center!
Inox Movies (Rating – 1/2star): Again very mobile unfriendly. Heavy use of Flash (with no back up images) which doesn’t load on the phone and also heavy use of images. Adlabs, at least had a phone number on the first page, on this site, you have to guess that ‘insta tickets’ means/will have more details of Phone numbers! Anyways, found the movie, selected it and 3 page loads later its a dead end – application error! Complete waste of time.
PVR Cinemas (Rating 0 Star): First load – Server error! Second load, the initial screen for selecting cities – What’s with those huge square boxes before the city name? Select city, next page load, server error! I am not going to try anything more on this site.
Cinemax (Rating 1/2 Star): The page takes ages to load! Layout is extremely bad. Luckily, I spot the registration link, refrain myself from even searching as I guess that even listing movies will require me to login (which is true!). Saving grace – phone numbers on top.
Fame (Rating 1/2 Star): Graphics heavy. A flash image has the phone numbers, which cannot be seen on the iPhone. Could find the movie timings at the least.
Overall, futile 15 mins spent. I had a phone, so probably should have called them and wasted 15 mins instead to get info as per my requirement.
I am pretty sure its the same on any (smart)phone with any type of browser. Infact, I don’t think they should be rated at all. The fact that I could atleast get the theater phone numbers was the saving grace which I could have got from the Google search results page itself with a proper search query!
