i got an easter card today via yahoo! greetings from my cousin in sicily with some cute dancing pulcini hatching from their easter eggs, which was cool, but what caught my eye was the possible responses to the card, one of which was "Invia una cartolina al cellulare di gina" which means "send a postcard greeting to gina's cellular phone".
cool. when you click on that, you get a bunch of choices that would allow me to send to her cell number she had registered in my yahoo. i went on to look at the other services such as the java games available at mobile yahoo! italia. this is remarkably easy for yahoo to support in italy. click, send to your GSM number.
compare that with something like this at the yahoo! us portal and see the "will this work on my phone?" sidebar. enter carrier. enter phone brand. enter phone model. i wonder how many people go through the motions after choosing "verizon".
ug. what a pain. but it's what we have to do to create a usable user interface for the masses here in the US.
i have clients that are struggling with this right now. they want to offer mobile services to their subscribers that happen to have mobile phones, but there's always this dichotomy between GSM/CDMA and a separate dichotomy between J2ME/BREW that needs to be accounted for in every offering, making development expensive, and customer support onerous.
there are number of companies, startup and otherwise, that are trying to bridge that gap here, in my opinion, not having a lot of success. the carriers depending on who you talk to, haven't decided whether inter-operability will help them or harm them - but the reality of situation is that non inter-operability between the wireless carriers is hurting both the carriers and the companies providing services on the carriers' network, and slowing adoption of wireless data services here in the US.
Posted by Steve at April 13, 2004 09:56 AM | TrackBack