Live On The Go (liveonthego.com) seems to be a rather cool service that lets you use your iPhone, BlackBerry or Symbian phone to place takeout food orders at nearby restaurants in the US only. You search for restaurants by zip code or address and browse takeout menus, selecting the items you want. LiveOnTheGo places your order and tells you when it will be ready for pickup.

I’m somewhat surprised by the rather limited handset support. Live On The Go is a web app, though not a very sophisticated one, just a series of web forms. It’s not even location enabled, something that’s doable on the iPhone and BlackBerry. It seems to work on just about any BlackBerry, even ancient models running BlackBerry OS 4.1. The BlackBerry browser, especially on older models, is one of the worst mobile browsers on any smartphone. If this site works on an old BlackBerry, there is no reason why it shouldn’t also work with Android, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile devices, Opera Mini and even some of the better feature phone browsers. But if you go to liveonthego.com with any of those browsers you get redirected to the desktop site, which is usable on my Android phone at least, but not nearly as convenient as the mobile one would be.

According to both AdMob and Millennial, smartphones still account for less than 50% of total mobile web and application traffic in the US!  iPhone, Blackberry and and Symbian account for less , probably only a third.  Live On The Go seems like a smart outfit but why are they throwing away two thirds of their potential market by restricting access to their mobile site to a subset of capable phones?

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Search/Local/City and Campus Guides

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 2 “Bad”

Mobile Link: liveonthego.com