WAP man loses shirt on Monty's Pass

ONE OF the few successful applications for WAP phones is supposed to be placing a last minute bet on a horse race.

Sadly the British mobile phone industry hasn't learnt its lesson. Despite gallant efforts, the INQ failed to place a bet on Monty's Pass in the Grand National steeple race held at Aintree near Liverpool today (April 5th).

Potentially we could have won up to £560.

What happened? Not been keen gamblers, we couldn't remember the passwords for Coral's WAP gambling service. So a quick trawl on Google showed that ukbetting.co.uk had previously made a splash by hooking up with Orange to offer WAP based betting on the National.

After some time trying to find the service on Orange's WAP portal, it informed us that in order to open an account we needed a credit or debit card plus access to an HTML screen to create an account.

A pretty crazy situation as we'd expected to be able to add say £5 to our mobile bill to place the bet. Two hours before the race, an account was created but the betting service's payment server was unable to accept our stake.

As ukbetting.co.uk claims it will match a new punter's first stake up to £20, we plotted to place that amount on the race.

Our choice, Monty's Pass, was selected purely because it's a colleague's nickname. At 14-1, that could have been £560 because it came in first. Yet ukbetting's servers never let us on despite repeated efforts to create a stake. Hopefully 3G services will be a little bit more user friendly than this.