New cell phone services announced at CES
1/6/2006 12:48:41 PM, by Anders Bylund
With the Consumer Electronics Show of 2006 in full swing, there have been a handful of interesting partnerships involving wireless phone services, and we're here to give you a taste of that. In case you're looking for tasty new handsets, you're reading the wrong article. This will be all about services, OK? Good. Here we go, then:
First up, web behemoth Yahoo! announced their Yahoo Go Mobile service suite, which should be available for download today and provides a unified, small-screen optimized interface to an impressive selection of the services you'd normally go to the regular Y! portal for. Mobile versions of Yahoo Messenger and Mail have been available for a while, and you could always just use your phone's web browser to get to other applications, but the new offering adds a number of new mobile apps such as news and sports service, a proper address book, and photo management (leveraging Yahoo Photo, not Flickr). There is also a new, streamlined interface and a coherent user experience, with easy navigation between the different components. Company officials say that video and music services are not part of the launch, but may show up later.
Yahoo Go Mobile will initially work only on number one cell phone manufacturer Nokia's 60 series of phones, and is carrier-agnostic. Work is in progress to get Motorola hardware up to speed as well, and in fact, our man in Vegas saw the app working on a Motorola phone today. Yahoo representatives say that any Java-capable phone should be able to run the service later this year. The Yahoo Go platform isn't just for smartphones and handhelds, either:
Another version of Yahoo Go for PC-connected televisions, called Yahoo Go TV, will be launched in coming months, the company said. It will similarly let Yahoo users access much of their personalized Web data as long as the TV is connected to the Internet.
After that, there will be Yahoo Go Desktop, which looks like a reworking and rebranding of the existing Yahoo Dashboard and Yahoo Widget Engine, aka Konfabulator. The idea is to bring information to the people when they want it, how they want it, and apparently whether or not they want it.
There's no sense in letting Yahoo have all the fun, so Google is partnering up with Motorola in a less impressive but still possibly game-changing deal. Starting this quarter, and for the next three years, Motorola handsets will come with a Google button on their keypads, so you can access Google through a single button push rather than digging through menus. There is really no new functionality involved here, but Joe Public is a sucker for increased convenience, and the hope is that even technology-resistant folks like Grandma Bertha might use a button that's right there on the phone, even if she never uses the menu system and has to have little Plottrik help her set the thing up. To underscore how important it is to have Google easily accessible, Nikesh Arora, Google's VP of European Operations, echoes the "all the info, all the time" theme:
"Access to information is imperative for people on-the-go. Whether checking the local weather or locating the restaurant of their choice, consumers today require personalized search services that are tailored to their needs. With immediate access to Google, millions of Motorola users worldwide will be able to quickly and easily find information that's important to them."
"People are going to spend all their [online] time on [mobile devices] eventually," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He expects that much of that usage will come from the combination of phones that can pinpoint user location with its localized search software. "The most obvious thing is maps," Schmidt said.
Motorola wasn't satisfied with just Google, so they also struck an accord with good old Eastman Kodak, bringing in their photo expertise to Moto handsets for the next ten years. The companies say that printing from your camera phone should be a one-click process, and Kodak also hopes to improve on image management, and enable some in-phone photo editing. Whether that capability would go beyond red-eye reduction, cropping and color balancing remains to be seen. Finally, Kodak will provide patents and engineering assistance to help their partner improve their phone cameras, which allegedly lag the quality and features of Sony Ericsson's and Nokia's. Kodak is fighting hard to stay relevant in the era of digital photography, and a partnership of this magnitude does look like a healthy initiative.
Moving on, Verizon's V Cast has been available for movies and games since January of last year, but Verizon has now announced that a V Cast Music service will join the lineup on January 16. The content library, provided by WiderThan, is expected to number one million songs "by spring," which may be a far cry from iTunes' two million, but nothing to sneeze at. Users will be able to synchronize their Verizon music library between their phones and computers through a USB cable, and it's all DRM-protected Windows Media that keeps the studios satisfied. At least the restrictions look fairly slack, as there is no limit on the number of devices to which you can download each tune.
Where the V Cast Music service starts to look silly to me is in the pricing scheme. For an industry-standard US$0.99, you can download songs to your desktop and then sync up the phone, or you can download straight to the phone and sync up the other way around for a full dollar more. I know that convenience is king, but is impulse shopping worth double the price? |
