Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Trying out AirWayChat
Update 060613: After 2 full weeks there's still a huge amount of downloads (> 25k a week), but very few simultaneous users. I counted around 50 active users in all rooms, and the "English" room contained only Russian discussions. Strange.
Considering the immense downloading since last week I had expected more to be active users of the application, but I rather noticed a constant entering and leaving the chat rooms (that were few), and only a few people were involved, asking questions like "anyone here?", "what's up?" etc clearly trying things out. I guess it should be expected this early on.
Some pros and cons noted:
Pros:
* The chat log is updated autonomously without any need to refresh, and it's very fast. The fastest I've seen on a phone.
* Photos can be sent to peers.
* It's possible to set up a profile with pictures for others to watch.
* Simple to log in, as the previously entered info is remembered.
* Smilies and special symbols are easily inserted, and are shown graphically in the log.
Cons:
* As indicated earlier this is a proprietary solution, so there's no gateway to MSN, Yahoo! etc. That might be the plan later though.
* The font looks pretty ugly: fixed pitch and only capitals means it's hard to read. Using the phone's own fonts (and at configurable sizes) would have given a better result, but maybe there would be problems with combining text and smilies then (not that I understand why).
* It's not possible to pause the updating of the history while logged in, meaning the data cost could become pretty steep over time if you forget to log off. It should be noted though that the data sent per request and response is very compact (I monitored the traffic).
* There's no way to store predefined text, which would have sped up chatting.
* Smilies are shown as ":)" etc (and not as icons) while editing.
Noted:
* To achieve an inline text input field on all phones the application uses its own implementation. My phone would otherwise have opened a full-display field for that, which would have obstructed the chat history. Doing so isn't a complete success though, as the symbols are not at the exact same places I'm used to from other applications. Also this field doesn't support predictive. There's a "T9" soft button, but that opens the phone's own (full display) text input, where obviously T9 or eZiText works.
The question is if a "walled garden" chat approach is interesting enough in the long term. It's a matter of critical mass. If too many similar applications are released there won't be enough people using each application to create and sustain a large community, so it will be interesting to see which one survives.
Here's a comparison of the most popular similar applications:
* AirWayChat, 25102 downloads last week
* mobispine, 12828 downloads last week
A general comment is that many seem to download free applications on pure chance, but only a very small percentage seems to then use them after initial brief trial.
Considering the immense downloading since last week I had expected more to be active users of the application, but I rather noticed a constant entering and leaving the chat rooms (that were few), and only a few people were involved, asking questions like "anyone here?", "what's up?" etc clearly trying things out. I guess it should be expected this early on.
Some pros and cons noted:
Pros:
* The chat log is updated autonomously without any need to refresh, and it's very fast. The fastest I've seen on a phone.
* Photos can be sent to peers.
* It's possible to set up a profile with pictures for others to watch.
* Simple to log in, as the previously entered info is remembered.
* Smilies and special symbols are easily inserted, and are shown graphically in the log.
Cons:
* As indicated earlier this is a proprietary solution, so there's no gateway to MSN, Yahoo! etc. That might be the plan later though.
* The font looks pretty ugly: fixed pitch and only capitals means it's hard to read. Using the phone's own fonts (and at configurable sizes) would have given a better result, but maybe there would be problems with combining text and smilies then (not that I understand why).
* It's not possible to pause the updating of the history while logged in, meaning the data cost could become pretty steep over time if you forget to log off. It should be noted though that the data sent per request and response is very compact (I monitored the traffic).
* There's no way to store predefined text, which would have sped up chatting.
* Smilies are shown as ":)" etc (and not as icons) while editing.
Noted:
* To achieve an inline text input field on all phones the application uses its own implementation. My phone would otherwise have opened a full-display field for that, which would have obstructed the chat history. Doing so isn't a complete success though, as the symbols are not at the exact same places I'm used to from other applications. Also this field doesn't support predictive. There's a "T9" soft button, but that opens the phone's own (full display) text input, where obviously T9 or eZiText works.
The question is if a "walled garden" chat approach is interesting enough in the long term. It's a matter of critical mass. If too many similar applications are released there won't be enough people using each application to create and sustain a large community, so it will be interesting to see which one survives.
Here's a comparison of the most popular similar applications:
* AirWayChat, 25102 downloads last week
* mobispine, 12828 downloads last week
A general comment is that many seem to download free applications on pure chance, but only a very small percentage seems to then use them after initial brief trial.
