elmatador, where you been hiding?
Your post was an eye opener, I found it very interesting, basically because of your first hand exposure. But what you stated seems to fly in the face of all I've read about Sotckholm, Helsinki and Tokyo.
Perhaps you can debunk the following article. Where does reality end, and marketecture begin. Although, this would appear to be an independent author and not a company pitch, but he could have been mesmerized, too. Who knows. You're the expert on Scandanavian telecom. What say?
ecompany.com
Copied below for posterity.
FAC
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"The Silence of the Finns"
By: Justin Fox June 2000
You might think that Helsinki, as ground zero of the global mobile-phone revolution, would be a really irritating place. In New York, London, Hong Kong, or the Stanford Shopping Center, there are enough people yapping impolitely into their Nokias, Ericssons, and Motorolas to drive any innocent bystander nuts. So in the capital of Finland, which boasts the highest concentration of mobile phones on earth—65 phones for every 100 people—the din should be out of control.
But it’s not. Walk around the streets and shopping malls of Helsinki, and you’ll be struck by how few people are talking into their mobile phones. Spend some time at Nokia’s headquarters in the nearby city of Espoo, and you’ll hardly ever hear a phone ring. Sure, you’ll see people carrying their phones, but for the most part they’re not talking into them. Instead, they’re staring at the tiny screens and punching number keys with their thumbs.
What are they doing? They’re reading and writing messages, or checking stock quotes, airline schedules, or their biorhythms. (Biorhythms, in case you missed the 1970s, are alleged cycles of physical and mental well-being based on one’s birthdate.) Basically, they’re surfing the Internet from their mobile phones—an activity the rest of the world is now embracing with great fanfare and advertising expense. But the Finns have been doing this for years.
The realization that Finland is ahead of the rest of the world in the use of wireless and other up-and-coming technologies is not new. As one German magazine put it recently, Finland is “das high-tech Wunderland.”
But what’s fascinating about the way the Finns use their mobile phones is not that it’s so high tech. It’s that these people are so ... considerate. Mobile phones have been common accessories in Finland and the other Scandinavian countries for decades—radio telephones were big there in the 1960s and 1970s, and the first cellular systems went online back in 1981—so people have had time to figure out how to use these devices sensibly and unobtrusively.
Finland used to have big problems with phones ringing wildly at meetings, movies, and concerts, but not anymore: Its mobile-phone users have learned how to behave.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to turn off the ringer and forsake talking into your phone in restaurants when you can keep in touch some other way. This is where Finland’s version of the wireless Internet comes in. The true mobile Internet, using pricey Wireless Application Protocol phones, became available in Europe last year and is just now trickling into the United States. Japan’s I-mode Internet phones have been around a bit longer but are still novelties.
The Finns, meanwhile, have been able to send and receive text messages over their mobile phones since 1994, thanks to a technology called the Short Message Service that was built into Europe’s GSM mobile-phone networks in the early 1990s. Given these prehistoric origins, it should be no surprise that SMS is far from cutting edge. Messages are limited to 160 characters, and using any of the more advanced services involves memorizing complicated codes. Furthermore, since phone keyboards aren’t exactly designed for writing letters, typing involves serious concentration. For example, to get the letter R, you press the 7 key three times; a comma requires punching 1 twice; and so forth. It took a while for Finns to get used to all this hassle, and it wasn’t until 1998 that SMS traffic really took off. In 1999, Finland’s 3.3 million mobile-phone users sent 650 million text messages, generating $170 million in revenue for cellular operators.
What does this traffic consist of? “In the very beginning, almost all usage was nonsense—jokes, horoscopes, anonymous chat, biorhythms,” says Mato Valtonen, the former Leningrad Cowboys lead singer who cofounded WapIT, which designs data services for mobile phones. “Now, useful services like stock quotes are growing. But it was kids who started it. They don’t want to know about the stock market; they want funny things.”
The habit of communicating through SMS, which began among teenagers, has become widespread. People use SMS technology to check their bank balances and transfer money between accounts, read e-mail forwarded from their Internet accounts, get recipes, look up phone numbers throughout Europe, download new ringing tones for their phones, and check their cellular account balances. The last service is a favorite of Jari Jaakkola, executive VP of corporate communications and investor relations at Sonera. “People actually pay us money to find out how much money they owe us,” Jaakkola says.
The Finns have turned out to be trendsetters: As SMS technology spreads around the world, people in other countries are now emulating them. Some SMS functions are available wherever GSM phones are used—throughout Europe, in most of Asia and Africa, and in some U.S. networks.
In several East Asian countries, SMS use is already surpassing Finnish levels. But the Finns are doing their best to hang on to their status as global mobile-phone pioneers. If Finland continues to be the leader in mobile-phone tricks, the future may be in cell-phone icons. The hottest SMS fad in Finland this year is downloading images to replace the phone-company logo that usually appears on an LCD screen. People can buy an image of a guitar, say, or a cat or a tennis racket. “In the supermarket there might be a guy with a laptop saying, ‘You want a graphic? I’ll send it to you for 5 marks [about $1],’” says WapIT’s Valtonen.
As far as technological developments go, this may not be what you’d call a paradigm shift, but it’s yet another sign that the mobile phone may have more in common with the customizable PC than it does with the standard telephone from which it evolved. (And this, remember, is all done with standard-issue cell phones, not the new Internet-ready ones now on the market.) As the first mover, Finland is showing the rest of the world how to make the mobile phone more useful and less obtrusive. This contribution could wind up being Finland’s most influential cultural export since Abba. Hang on. Abba was Swedish. |
