Quick.as is a new web and mobile portal or start page. It offers a single search box that lets you search with a dozen different search engines on basic phones and over a hundred different search engines ranging form Google and Yahoo to the Shenzen Stock Exchange and The Pirate Bay on the desktop and phones that support JavaScript Quick.as is not a meta-search engine, you have to choose a single search engine for each query,

Quick.as claims to detect your phone type and location and deliver appropriately formatted pages and locally relevant results. I found that both features generally worked as advertised. On an N95 and an Android phone I got Google’s mobile web search and Yelp searches defaulted to San Francisco. However a Yellow Pages search for “sushi” dumped me on the Yellow Pages mobile homepage where I was prompted for both “Search Term” and “City/State or ZIP”!

Quick.as has a small link directory of popular news, sports, social network, email and online banking sites. These links point at non-mobile sites even on the mobile edition of Quick.as. If you set up an account on the Quick.as desktop site you can delete and edit the quick links and add your own.

I think that the concept of Quick.as is good but I’m a little disappointed in the mobile integration. Login is by email address and a 7 character password. Login is persistent for only 2 weeks. Email addresses are a pain to type on mobile because of their length and the “@” sign. The relatively long password and short login retention are both mobile unfriendly and unnecessarily paranoid for a site that stores a simple list of links. Mobile usability would be improved by allowing users to pick a short ID and password and by persisting logins until explicit logout.

Another mobile usability issue is that Quick Links are the same across desktop and mobile and require a PC to setup and edit. This excludes the huge and growing number of mobile-only users, especially in the developing world. Also I believe that most users will want a different set of bookmarks on mobile than on the desktop. Either links to mobile vs. desktop versions of sites or to different sites entirely.

Quick.as was submitted for review by @andrewjb44 Thanks, Andrew.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Portals/WAP

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 1 “Bad”

Mobile Link: m.quick.as