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Entertainment.
Introduction.
Powerful mobile phones, armed with excellent graphics, are at
the forefront of the next mass computing revolution to hit the
world after the PC. Industry leaders are struggling to grapple
with the implications. The numbers, for one thing, are enormous.Consider
these figures:
- 2.7 billion mobile phones world-wide in 2006.
- The number of mobile phones exceeds the number of land-line
phones in many countries, particularly developing ones.
- 80% of the world's habitable area has cell coverage.
- Africa is the market with the largest percentage growth
in mobile phone users.
- India is the market with the largest individual growth
(6 million mobile phones sold every month).
- In some countries, access to the Internet through mobiles
already exceeds the access through PCs(Japan, South Korea,
China,India).
Technology.
Mobile phones use radio waves for communication.Networks comprise
a base station and towers.Each tower has a small range of 8-10
km. The automatic "handing over" protocol by which one tower
hands over to another when the first one goes out of range and
the second one seamlessly takes over, is a key feature to facilitate
the explosion of the mobile phone industry we see today, together,
of course, with the increasing availability of band-width and
the miniaturisation of the hardware.
Two major competing technologies in use today are:
- GSM.This is exclusively used in Europe, Africa and many
Asian countries.
- CDMA.This is used in USA,Australia,Brazil,Japan,India
and South Korea.GSM is also available in these countries
as a competing technology.
3G
These are cellular telephone networks built to incorporate high-speed
internet access and telephony, including video.The number of
3G connections world-wide has been estimated variously as 200
million or 475 million, depending on what exactly constitutes
or does not constitute 3G.This is still a small percentage of
the total mobile population.
Convergence.
With so many connected consumers in a large and growing market,
it is natural for businesses to seek to provide additional services
beyond basic communication.Downloadable music and video is one
area.Mobile games and gaming is another.
In addition to his/her ability to conveniently connect to the
internet immediately and in private, the mobile phone consumer
has a short attention span (a few minutes, typically),and is
interruption- prone. This is no disadvantage to the mobile gamer-
nor for players of those games designed with these limitations
in view.
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