Mobile meets multimedia

Step off a Dart commuter train in a Dublin city centre station one of these days and you will be greeted by an array of billboard posters from Nokia promising new mobile phones that also double up as cameras and allow you to send pictures attached to text messages wirelessly to your friends and colleagues.

Multimedia messaging has finally arrived in Ireland – click a button on one of these new phones, the image is captured through a low resolution CCD, select a recipient, compose some rich text, attach the image, maybe some audio and then send. Sounds fantastic, you could almost say it represents a new revolution in mobile communications. Almost, until you learn just how much subscribing to one of these new services is going to cost you. It is really expensive.

Mobile operators Vodafone through its Live! service and O2 through its O2.ie mobile portal, have both launched new multimedia services aimed at “early technology adopters” and “heavy texters”. But the cost of sending these picture messages certainly rules out the text-mad teenagers from getting their hands on one of these phones.
Even the technology early adopters will tighten the purse strings when they see how much a subscription to a media messaging service is going to cost.

 

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Vodfone’s Live! service is marginally less expensive than the 02 equivalent but it will still cost a prospective user 49c each time they want to send a message that includes an image, some audio and some rich text, and if the data transmitted exceeds 30Kbyte, then the cost rises incrementally. 02 charges a flat rate of 50c regardless of the size of the file sent. Moreover, the handsets are hideously expensive despite the fact that they are being subsidised by the operators: For example, Vodafone’s entry level offering, the Sharp GX-10 will cost EUR299 if you are a billed customer signing up for a contract, but if you’re a pre-paid mobile phone user then it will cost you more EUR549 to equip yourself with this cool gadget.
Other models are even more expensive with the Panasonic GD87 costing EUR379 on a bill and EUR579 on a pre-paid. The Nokia 7650 costs the same as the Panasonic model.

The operators are quite prepared to admit that the cost of the handsets will be a major barrier to their uptake. Fiona O’Connor, product marketing manager, Vodafone Live! is quite modest in her predictions, expecting just 2% of the mobile phone market to be using these phones in 12 months time: “Early adopters and gadget freaks will be the first to take these phones on-board but we (Vodafone) are confident that the 16-25 market for these devices and services will mature in six to 12 months.” We think the prices of both the phones and the services will have to come down significantly first for this to happen.

Multimedia messaging is only one flavour of GPRS, albeit it is where consumers will see most value despite the fact that O2 now offer downloadable colour Java programmed games (think Centipede Atari 2600-style!) and location finder services from its Website (www.02.ie) – these remain niche applications.

But GPRS is also a powerful business tool and not just for corporate executives who want to retrieve and send data to a central information server.

John Barron, product manager, Workanywhere, Vodafone says that GPRS by offering an ‘always on’ connection and data that is charged by the amount transmitted, offers small business users who work remotely, a very effective tool for downloading and/or sending short, text-based e-mail from their notebook without worrying about running up large bills for staying online on their mobile for extended periods.

Barron does recommend that mobile workers who want to send or receive graphic files or attachments with their e-mail should still look at the company’s High Speed Circuit Switched Data Product (HSCSD) which bonds several GSM channels together to give speeds of up to 44Kbit/s. It is a dial-up rather than always on product but is extremely reliable and fast even in congested network conditions. It will be offered alongside GPRS for at least another two years according to Barron.

GPRS may only offer transmission speeds that top out at 44Kbit/s today, but by Summer of next year, Barron speculates that it could be up to 64Kbit/s – the equivalent of single channel ISDN – the fixed line Internet connection of many small businesses at the moment.