Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Update 20061005: Found this older story on the same subject. It's still quite valid.
Opinion: Instant Messaging vs SMS/MMS

Paul Golding at Wireless Wonders ponders on whether Mobile IM will fly and if not why not. I wrote a comment that might not get published, so here it is (me quoting myself). What I try to bring across is: Does it matter if Mobile IM is not as convenient as PC IM as long as it's a generally more convenient way of communicating from a phone?

I'm not sure your arguments matter if you consider that the users are much more likely to be beside a mobile phone than a PC, hence can be contacted anytime. The end-user results should be respected of course, but the reasons might be different from the obvious ones.

What I don't understand is why mobile IM would be worse than SMS:
* messages don't fill up any inbox
* you write and read messages from the same UI
* IM can add functionality like sending photos, files etc
Hence this can be a matter of adoption time. SMS took a long time to be adopted too.

Also, I don't think the UI limitations are that bad as SMS has the same issues with a crappy keypad and lack of real estate for reading messages. I wish more phones came with alphanumeric keypads and had a landscape display (good also for videos and photos), even in mass market phones.

We tend to repeat the same mistakes in this industry when talking new phenomena:
* We compare with ourselves, yet we are not in the key demographic.
* Adoption takes time. SMS took a very long time to become broadly adopted, so why do we expect mobile IM to be so over-night?

It doesn't really matter if 3 fails in its pitching of MSN, as the promotion can be considered general ("we stick out, so get a sub at 3, rather than at X") and they acquired a "plug-n-play" solution from OZ. Sure, the server must have cost some, but that's nothing compared to the possible increased revenue they can get from long-time subscribers.

Wireless Wonders: Mobile IM - is it really IM?