Saturday, December 18, 2004

Chatterbox

Chatterbox

Picture courtesy of Motorola

The San Jose Mercury has an interesting article on the 'new' addition of mobile chat for young people facilitated by the Motorola A630 phone pictured. This provides a mini keyboard and phone all in one. Despite initial appearances the phone does not have anyway near as much
features as a Treo or Symbian smartphone such as calendar or data organisation.

The information about the price plan is also interesting, by using even a cheap but well designed phone, the cellular service provider can increase the revenue spend of the customer by an extra 240USD per year. In Europe, young mobile users have adopted these technologies already without being 'spoon fed' with a QWERTY keyboard, partily due to the longer term popularity of SMS.

T-Mobile charges 4.99USD a month for unlimited access to e-mail and WAP browsing. There's a separate plan for short text messages and IM: 2.99USD a month for 20 messages, or 6.99USD a month for 100 messages, with each IM sent and received counting as one message. There's also an option for unlimited e-mail, WAP and text/IM messaging at 20USD a month. Any of these plans come on top of whatever voice plan you select.