No Takers for ‘Life Phone’ Mobiles

There are no takers for mobiles for aged people. 'Life phone' is manufactured by an Austrian company for aged people. It has a simple interface, bigger buttons, longer battery life and an orange screen which will aid people with poor eyesight and a red panic button to dial five chosen numbers in case of medical emergencies.

In the United Kingdom, Neither network operator is ready to cooperate with the ‘aged’ mobile nor are retailers interested in displaying Life Phones. They are keener on attracting youth with iPhones and other snazzy mobiles which offer multimedia experience of music and videos.

Source: The Asian Age

Gold Plated Phone For Olympics

Samsung Electronics is coming up with a special 18-carat gold-plated mobile phone in China to mark next year's Olympics in Beijing. The sleek-looking phone, dubbed the P318, is deep black in color, with the gold placed in the trim along the sides and covering the bottom half of its back.

Source: ET

Disney Mobics

The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG), a division of Walt Disney, is all set to woo Indian mobile users with comic strips and full-length stories on mobile phones.Reliance Communications users will be able to download the comic strips for just Rs 3, while Airtel and Hutch subscribers may download the entire story for around Rs 50.

Disney is making the mobile comics available in two categories — Daily comic strips and Entire comic stories. In the daily comic category, one can download “Mickey” and “Winnie the Pooh”, while “Pirates of the Caribbean” will be the first book available for download by the end of this week.

Source: Business Standard

BSNL Struggling in Mobile Arena

Telecom operators in the private sector must be delighted to see BSNL on a ventilator. BSNL is falling behind in the race to acquire more subscribers. To them, it now seems only a matter of time before the BSNL fades into the ranks of an also-ran.

Over the last 4 months (March-June 2007), telecom operators in the country, grew on average, by 12%. All the players put together added 14.56 million new subscribers during the period. BSNL added just 1 million subscribers across its 21 circles in last 4 months. In this period, its subscriber base barely inched from 27.42 million to 28.42 million, a mere 3% growth.

Source: TOI

Usability Study on iPhone

Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric conducted a usability test with iPhone customers who purchased their iPhones on the first day of its US release. The goal of this study was to identify overall ease-of-use factors and general usability issues.

Major strengths of the iPhone's user interface

• Participants found the Visual Voicemail feature to be intuitive and useful
• Participants compared text entry using their iPhone and their previous phones (which used multi-tap for text entry). Overall, participants found that text entry was much easier on the touchscreen soft-keyboard of the iPhone compared to standard multi-tap text entry.
• Most participants used the landscape (horizontal) view while searching for a website (The New York Times.) The horizontal soft keyboard was definitely preferred over the vertical keyboard orientation.
• Selecting and playing a song using both the vertical and horizontal views was easy for participants. Participants also commented that the 'Cover Flow' navigation feature was a very engaging feature.
• Making an outgoing call with the iPhone was easy for all participants.
• Participants also found that receiving a phone call on an iPhone while listening to music was seamless. They found the interruption of the music and transition to a call to be very smooth.
• Saving a number as a contact and recalling that contact for a phone call was straightforward.
• Answering a phone call while in SMS mode was also straightforward. Participants found it helpful to be taken immediately to their message after the call had concluded.
• Most participants found it easy to take a picture and email it from the iPhone.

Primary difficulties with the iPhone interface

• Participants uniformly found text entry SMS and email to be difficult. They were frustrated by the forced use the vertical keyboard and the lack of visibility for editing the middle of a word or sentence.
• Many participants found Google Maps difficult to use on the iPhone. They experienced issues with the fine-motor control required to pan accurately in different dimensions in Google Maps and predictably zoom in and out. It was unclear to participants how much they needed to adjust the size of their "pinch" gesture to zoom in and out with the control that they wanted.
• Participants were often frustrated with their Web browsing experience and hoped that this would improve dramatically with an upgrade in network capability. The lack of Flash and Java capabilities during Web browsing was considered a detriment to basic Web use.
• Finally, participants were surprised (and somewhat annoyed) to discover that horizontal text entry was available only in in the Safari browser.

Source: Usercentric.com

Locate Yourself Faster

The Assisted GPS (A-GPS) service from Nokia helps Nokia Maps users to find their current locations faster and get to their desired locations quicker using their mobile device with built-in GPS. Nokia intends to equip all of its future devices that have built-in GPS with this service. The first devices to use this service are the Nokia 6110 Navigator & N95.

This service reduces the time a connected mobile device takes to find its current position, known as time to first fix (TTFF) for most geographical locations worldwide. The reduced fix times can increase and improve the usability for all Nokia location-based experiences.

Source: Nokia Press Office

Get The Basics Right!

What’s important in a business class handheld device? Battery life and decent voice support are top of the list, with the more “newsworthy” stuff like cameras, GPS and Voice over WiFi coming towards the bottom. The big message to the mobile industry here is that business customers would much prefer vendors and service providers to get the basics right before messing around with bells and whistles.

Source: The Register

Is Mobile Gaming Industry Booming?

Global Industry Analysts are predicting the mobile games market will top $20 billion by 2010. GIA thinks that java-based games, 3D games and Bluetooth games are amongst the popular ones. Earlier this month Gartner predicted that the global mobile games market would hit $9.6 billion by 2011, and yesterday iSuppli predicted the total mobile content market would hit $44 billion by 2011.

Trying to work out the true size of the potential mobile games market is extremely difficult. When you compare industry trends, sometimes it seems like the games market is dying off as less people spend money on subscription-based services, whilst at the same time more traditional games developers are moving into the mobile space with well known brands, often licensing these games to carriers rather than through subscription or single sale portals.

Source: Mobile weblog

Google Bought GrandCentral

Google is buying GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides a single number that can be routed to any phone, effectively allowing people to have only one number, regardless of device or location.

Source: Mobile weblog