On June 12th I wrote about the eBay San Dimas beta program and also noted I would write about the program again if I were to become a beta tester. I did in fact get a beta invitation a week or two ago, installed the program, but could not get it to work. Though I was logged in and had Internet connectivity, I could not get the program to do anything. Every option was grayed out and there was a red X over an icon which meant to me there was a problem somewhere. As time is not easy to come by around here, I tabled the program figuring I would get back to it and when I did, hopefully it would work. Well, I got back to it today, and there was an upgrade it told me I had to install, and after doing that everything worked fine. So onto my review...
San Dimas is basically a desktop gateway to the world of eBay. It presents users with a new interface through which they can search for and buy products, as well as save information about auctions they have viewed. It is nothing revolutionary, but it is a lot more "web 2.0" in appearance and interaction than eBay's actual web site. That being said, I ran the application on a dual processor machine running Windows XP with 2 GB of RAM installed and a 9 mbps pipeline, and the program was slooooow. It reminded me of when I had to navigate eBay while on the road earlier this year with only a dial-up connection available. Nothing like clicking on an option and then thinking about what you will do next while the page is loading. I don't know what is to blame- I did browse around eBay's site in between using San Dimas today to make sure it was not a problem with the Internet connection or my PC. I won't judge a beta on speed, but if the official release of this program is as sluggish as it is right now, it will be hard to get users (especially those on Vista, which is a memory hog itself) to want to use the program when using the eBay web site interface is much faster.
These were my initial reactions to the program. Despite its slowness I will attempt to utilize its features some more this coming weekend and report about it back here early next week.
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