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segunda-feira, maio 16, 2005

Mobile e-mail a killer application ?

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The bigger picture is more intriguing. RIM has been stunningly successful, but even it has only around 3m users, mostly itinerant corporate executives. This compares with an estimated 150m employees worldwide who rely on e-mail but do not yet have a mobile service for it—not to mention the 1.5 billion consumers who have mobile phones, love text messaging and might also love e-mail. Of the 680m handsets sold last year, only 20m were so-called “smartphones” that double as calendar, contact book and e-mail device.

“It is still early, early, early in this—dare we say nascent?—trend,” says Pip Coburn, an analyst at UBS. He expects mobile e-mail to be a “killer application” because it taps into people's strongest psycho-emotional needs—the urge to connect with others (and simultaneous fear of social isolation if they cannot), as well as the desire to be mobile—while asking relatively little of them by way of new learning, as they already know how to send e-mail via their PCs. Indeed, e-mail is likely to blow away a lot of the other fancy services that mobile operators are hoping to push over their third-generation wireless networks. Andrew Odlyzko, a telecoms guru, once did a survey in which he asked people to choose, hypothetically, between having either e-mail or the entire content of the world wide web: 95% chose e-mail.
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Economist.com | Articles by Subject | Mobile e-mail

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