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How about offline Tesco shopping by wireless?

Tesco is famous for being the first supermarket to sell over the Internet; and it is now becoming remarkable for allowing you to buy when you aren't on the Internet, too. Puzzled?

The offline shopper was developed by DAT Group, and showed off at the Microsoft MDC today - to cries of bafflement. Why, asked visitors, would you want a way of buying offline? You can do that already, surely?

What this really is, is a way of turning your shopping list into an Internet order. You have a "reasonably up to date" list of Tesco goods in stock on your handheld PDA, and you can update it once or twice a month. And then you just look through the stocks and add things to your basket in time-honoured Amazon style; and next time you check in at Tesco, you place the order and select a delivery time.

And as long as you pay in advance for your GPRS subscription, the update won't cost you more than a few pounds. Which is the first problem; it could cost you a fiver to update the product list.

And to be honest, the application isn't as impressive as it should be. But that's not DAT's fault; blame Tesco.

The problem is, Tesco doesn't actually have a sophisticated Web operation. It has one of the original Web sites; it's a bit of a mishmash, and the data in it is not a simple reflection of a Web Server which presents the internal stock list. Rather, it's a list compiled, daily, by people walking around the stores, and it's apparently spread across several unrelated servers.

What DAT might be assumed to do, is to download the 25,000 stock-keeping units into about three megabytes of memory, and then, each time you check in to Tesco.com, to download just a couple of kilobytes of changes. In fact, the download takes several minutes over GPRS, because it has to download the whole 25,000 stock-keeping unit database (compressed) and this is going to cost you; it will cost you around 300K of data.

And there are mobile phone companies which will charge you upwards of a fiver for the privilege.

DAT Group can do neat applications. If you want to see one, don't try the idiosyncratic Web site - call the marketing department on (0) 870 606 5550 and ask for the Case Study on the Vodafone Install Wizard. This makes sure that if you have a PDA, and decide to buy a mobile phone, you can link them together and test the link before you leave the shop.

Oh, and don't let them show you the application demonstration on a Casio, either. It is supposed to take only a second or so to search through the Tesco stock list. On a rather more workmanlike Pocket PC, it probably does; on the Casio device, it was more like five or six.