This morning, five Buzzer readers were among the first non-TransLink members of the public to test out the new mobile site. Choosing only five of the 37 people who applied to be testers was not easy. I appreciate all the enthusiastic applications many of you sent in!

All but one tester brought an iPhone4 (we also had a Palm Pre in the mix) to try out the new TransLink mobile website. This was a good thing since this first phase of the new mobile site works best on iPhones (4 and 3Gs) and iPads. I’ve heard that the site also works fine with some Android phones and newer touchscreen BlackBerry phones. As the mobile team has told me, they want to get the three releases of the new mobile site up and working (Release 1 – searching by stop #, Release 2 – searching by route, Release 3 – searching by location) before they work on perfecting the compatibility of the mobile site with other phones and operating systems.

The testers sat down with a member of our mobile site team and were given access to the new site on their phones. Having over an hour to see how it worked, they peppered myself and our team member with questions about this and future releases of the site.

On the whole, the testers seemed to like the new site and found it easy to use. “Much better than the existing site,” was one comment I heard.

I wish I could tell you more about what was discussed, but that would spoil the surprise for when it goes live next Tuesday, September 6th!