"So here I am in Monaco, and reading the tea leaves..." Ewan muses below on the 'next big thing' for the mobile industry. On the one hand, messaging stalwarts are already doing it and without the networks help. On the other, new users face a confusion on all sides due to the many types of IM. Read on...
Read on in the full article.
Well in South Africa we hae a very popular, all be it JAVA based solution. Provided by a small company from Stellenbosch mxit.co.za. The programme basically works off your data plan and is much cheaper than sms and they are basically signing about a 1000 new users a month and in about 18 months they have signed up over 1 million users.
The nice thing also about it is that it connects to all other IM clients included desktop based clients.
WRONG. The next killer app (for 3G) is _cheap&easy_ video calls.
I mean the service price and the service readiness (like SMS, put a 3G SIM into phone, now you may video-call).
Otherwise there's no point in 3G investments.
2G works as well for IM and voice.
IP will eat your heart out, 3G, if providers will not see through their greed.
I don't get the popularity of video calls. Why do you need to see each others, and how annoying it must be always holding the phone in way that the other person can see your face. As for IM, I don't think it's such a big deal, there's new IM solutions popping up all the time now.
I do not agree with the comment about video calls - I already have the option to call people with voice - but like a video call - I have to stop and coexist with the person I am communicating with at the same time.
Various messaging services offer the abilty to communicate via time shift - whether it is a few seconds, minutes, hours, etc. I can send and reply to messages on my personal timeline.
I have historically avoided SMSs as they very often cost almost as much as a 1 minute phone call - I can make that call quicker. Nowadays, I use my phone for email, IM (GT, MSN, SKYPE). This is a fantastic solution for me, and I imagine many others (esp for international messaging) once the price is right (currently I pay 10 Euro for a 200 Meg data plan).
E61 Owner
Surely the IM issue had been solved for a long time. You can download a client to your phone or you can use a Web (WAP?)-based service ... and pay by the volume of data. Why does it need to be complicated when we've been operating like this for many years -- since my T68, I believe.