I’m part of the herd now, in more ways than one…since I started using cellphones, about four years ago (yes, very late), I’ve always had the cheapest handset money could buy (rather, the free one with the bundle). As a result, I was never really a big consumer of any kind of mobile content, even though I write a lot about the business side of it and observe people and kids using it (especially when I was living in London in 2003-2004).
That has changed over the last month or so: Nokia sent me a new N90, so I am now as cutting edge as I can possibly get. I won’t go into the review of the phone so much as to say that how a high-end phone has changed my consumption/interaction behavior with the phone. First of all, it has a 2-megapixel camera, which in itself has done a lot of good for me: I can take impulse pics, and decent quality too.
And I have used it on three continents over the last few weeks of my holiday travel: my home T-mobile account in U.S., Vodafone pay-as-you-go in London, and Airtel pre-paid in India.
And yes, I am consuming all kinds of content…wait, let me rephrase that: T-Mobile USA’s 2.5G data speed sucks for now, so I cannot view streaming video, or download anything decent. But just the fact that it is possible means that I’m doing it. I am using, lo behold, bluetooth. When I was in India, I got three ringtones over Bluetooth from my kid cousin. Yes, the kids in India know how to work on Bluetooth…it should become a big problem (or opportunity) pretty soon for the mobile content industry.
So anyway, I am now transferring songs through RS MMC card which comes with the N90. Even with a puny 64MB card that came with it, I can take 30-50 pics which is not bad.
And yes, as you read in my posts on Friday, I can now actually test an app: have been testing out the new Yahoo Go Mobile and have mixed feeling about it.
I even made a ringtone using Audacity and iTunes (it sounds complex but it isn’t): I like the theme song for the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, on CBS. So I went to the show website, where they have a streaming version of the opening song…I recorded the stream as a Wav file using Audacity, converted it to MP3 using iTunes, and then transferred it to the N90 using the Nokia software (or I could have used the Bluetooth in-built into my laptop too)
Anyway, the whole point of this rambling post: make it easy for mobile users to switch or choose their handsets (GSM-SIM-based makes that possible), and yes, they’ll do things with it that no amount of marketing can achieve. Free the consumer, and see mobile content usage rise….
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