Dating site, RDVMobile, uses Google Gears for location

Rating: Okay if you have the right browser

GoMo News came across a mailshot for a mobile ’social’ site that had never heard of before – RDVMobile. It appears to use Google gears as a means of showing members who is in close proximity. Shame we couldn’t find a handset to run it on.

To be fair the list of supported handsets is quite broad. It claims to work on the Apple iPhone (naturally) as well as Android handsets and Windows Mobile devices. It can even run on a Windows Mobile handset using the Opera Mobile 9.5 browser.

It’s our guess that the author of RDVmobile (which means Rendezvous Mobile) is French. The clue is that if you click on the link to Wobility – the site’s author – the error messages are in French.

Come to think of it, when you log on initially, there’s the choice of English or French languages.

The sign-up process has an extraordinary bug. One of the parameters for joining (apart from being over 18, of course) is the country you live in. Strangely there is no option for Great Britain, the United Kingdom or England.

So we had to pretend to be in Ireland. The system also refused to validate our Vodafone 360 mailbox,too  so we had to resort to our Hotmail account instead.

Abandoning hopes of getting it to work on a mobile handset, we cheated and used the PC version instead. This meant we could use Google Gears. It definitely works because we found somebody active in Poitiers. Another clue that it’s French.

The blurb says that, “The concept of this new site is to combine a social network with a traditional meeting site to propose the most natural meeting service.”

Its aim is to enable participants “to extend their single people’s network as if in real life, with the help of new devices.”

Funnily enough, RDVMobile actually carries ads for other mobile dating sites such as wap.g8wave.co.uk and wap.loveleap.co.uk.

So if you’re bored and sitting on a train, now you have something to give a little light entertainment.

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran journalist he writes on the UK market…. contact him here mailto:tony@mobileinsight.co.uk