Rating: We still win £14 from Ladbrokes though
Whilst rival bookmaker, Paddy Power, has been in the news for the growth in its profits from the mobile sector (see here), GoMobile News suspects the same won’t be said about Labrokes. We spent the best part of an hour battling to place a bet on the Real Madrid versus Manchester United football match via its mobile site yesterday [March 5th 2013]. We were defeated – but so was Manchester United so we won £14.
The whole exercise stemmed from GoMobile News spotting an ad in the UK’s Sun newspaper which offered mobile customers a £10 free bet on that particular soccer match.
That compared to a measly £1 free better for ordinary punters so the gauntlet was thrown down and we decided to take on the challenge.
Our first major gripe is that from the Sun newspaper advertisement, consumers would have expected there to be a dedicated Android app because the PlayStore logo was on display.
Presently, it appears there is no such dedicated Android app despite our efforts to find it on GetJar as well as on Google Play.
So, when you text ‘SPORTS’ to 86131, instead of taking you to the Play store it simply takes you to the mobile friendly (we assume HTML5) site.
We managed to sign up alright to the Labrokes site but it proved impossible to upload our debit card details.
Even though we deployed a Bluetooth keyboard in order to make input easier, the Ladbrokes mobile site kept throwing us out for errors and sending us back to Square One.
So GoMobile News added our debit card details to our mobile account via a PC based browser.
Gamely, we then tried to place our bet via our Android smartphone but the site simply would not accept our commands to utilise our free bet.
So, in the end, we placed our free bet on Real Madrid to win via the standard HTML site.
The irony here is that as new mobile clients we received a £10 free bet instead of a mere £1 as standard web customers.
We placed the bet on real Madrid to win (after their performance in Barcelona) and are now happily £14 ahead.
The whole experience was extremely frustrating as an Android handset user and we suspect that far more testing of Ladbroke’s ‘mobile’ site is therefore required.
