I now have an iPhone. In fact I’ve had one for two weeks. It’s handy. It’s sleek. It’s fantastic; it gets me my email wherever I am.

But then there’s internet on the move. If there’s no EDGE, you might as well use a simple WAP page to look up simple things like train times or footy results – the typical stuff I need on the move. Trouble is, you can’t – the iPhone is designed to give you the full web experience (apart from anything that needs Flash, of course).

Slow connection

On Sunday, for example, I was attempting to look up some train times while on a stupidly busy train journey back from Brighton, the first part of which was formed by a rickety bus.

The National Rail site simply wouldn’t play ball; the connection was too slow. And the site’s mobile portal just wouldn’t work properly with the iPhone. Sometimes you do just want the text (or the use of a simple webapp). Hopefully someone will develop an app to enable WAP with the SDK. A Safari Lite, if you like.

Thankfully such problems are rare, even if the times that you do get annoyed are likely to be the times when you badly need something like a train time. The iPhone is an excellent browsing device, while the lack of cost for its auto-connections to hotspots or EDGE mean that you don’t mind waiting for pages to load.

3G will be very nice when it arrives, but it will surely cost in terms of the device, battery life and the contract. And that’s not ideal, either.