{"id":400,"date":"2007-09-22T00:15:49","date_gmt":"2007-09-22T07:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=400"},"modified":"2007-09-22T14:05:28","modified_gmt":"2007-09-22T21:05:28","slug":"vodafones-heavy-handed-transcoder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/400\/","title":{"rendered":"Vodafone’s Heavy-Handed Transcoder"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vodafone rolled out a new transcoding proxy a couple months ago in the UK, their home market. Its stated aim is to make the full web available to Vodafone customers by reformatting web content designed for PCs – making it usable on mainstream mobile phones. This is not a new idea, Google has been doing this for six years. There are many other mobile transcoders, I compared<\/a> 6 of them two years ago.<\/p>\n

I’m in the US so I have no way of seeing the Vodafone transcoder in action but if it’s like the others it makes sites, that would otherwise not even load, marginally usable with a phone browser. This is a good thing but hardly a great one. Transcoded content is never as easy to use as the same content delivered by a well designed mobile web page. Vodafone doesn’t seem to believe that and have taken the unprecedented step of making all access from all handsets on their network go through their proxy by default.<\/p>\n

Vodafone’s proxy also changes the user-agent header which is supposed to identify the browser originating the request. This has several unfortunate consequences for Vodafone’s users and for anyone in the business of delivering mobile content.<\/p>\n