Well here's a surprise. The Times Online reports that young phone users are not using the internet on their mobile phones.
Clearly they are competent with the technology, but why are they so slow to embrace internet services on their mobiles?
The answer is simple and obvious. Money. It costs to much to get data on your phone. At £7 per megabyte on PAYG it's not surprising. Vodafone typically charges £2 per meg for contract customers. web n walk system is an example of a good way forward - 7.50 for around a gig of download, but it is still not applicable to PAYG custoemrs.
The networks are desperate to increase mobile internet usage, and tie-in's with MySpace and Google are attempting to help this. But cynical attempts to increase interest in IP-based services cannot address the fundamental financial and functional issues - it's too expensive and too slow.
Interestingly the average young customer spends €25 (£17) a month on their bill — about 20 per cent more than the €21 (£14) spent by the wider population — and the majority of additional spending after the monthly contract goes on text messages, ringtones, picture messages and television voting.
The growth of mobile internet use, by comparison, remains slow. More than half of those surveyed said that they never browsed the internet, and only 8 per cent said that they used it once a week or more.
A separate study by Q Research shows only 3 per cent of young people aged 11 to 25 had downloaded music directly to their mobile phone, with the high cost of doing so the main dissuading factor. By comparison, two thirds of those aged 20 to 24 spend up to £10 a month on music downloads to their computer, and nearly half of those under 16 spend a similar amount.
Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, said: "Phone operators have gone from believing they can deliver everything themselves to realising that if a teenager wants to share photos, they're going to do it on Flickr, not via a Vodafone picture gallery."
Michel de Lussanet said: "Mobile phone companies have always been keen to offer internet services, but they’ve forgotten that people don't interact with their phones the same way that they do with their computers.
"Mobile TV, for instance, was a common offering early on — largely because it was technically possible — but operators didn't consider that the image wasn't like the one customers were used to in their lounge."
Exactly. It's pretty simple in fact - how many people use those tiny portable TV's? Very few. It doesn't take months of research and millions of pounds to know that!
The future is undoubtedly user generated content. No one trusts the phone networks to do it, and MySpace and YouTube show the future. Systems for mobile and web sharing such as immedia24 show where things are heading.
The customer, however, remains to be convinced. Despite 61 per cent of young people surveyed saying that they had internet on their phone, only 34 per cent wanted it on their next phone — in comparison with 65 per cent who wanted an MP3 player and 44 per cent who wanted Bluetooth.
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