Personalization of mobile

Guess how many applications I have and regularly use on my Symbian based Nokia phone?

- Outlook synced email service

- Reuters news on Business, Sports, Technology....

- Flurry Mail to get the quick views across my Yahoo mail account, Gmail account etc etc

- Flurry Feeds to get me regular RSS for cricket scores to technology scores

- Gmail for mobile

- Mobi Reader to read documents in mobile format

- Various widgets that gadget freaks ususally have.

Going forward, Personalization of the mobiles is where the money is.  The need would be more on functional parameters rather than heavy graphic based simple applications. For example, research suggest that the mobile market will grow to 4 Billion USD in the next few years.

However there will be a change in the portfolio offerings from mobile providers dictated by consumers.

- Most of us would lose interest in that Britney or Aishwarya Rai wall papers or posters. There is nothing dramatic in wall papers today compared to what it was four years ago. Today one could store any picture, perhaps taken from one's own mobile camera as wall paper.

- Ring Tone.  I do remember, about 4 years back, when I tried to compose my own ring tone. I was fed up with the standard Nokia tunes and my handset had an application that would convert standard frequencies (denoted by keyboard characters) into a tune. Being an Indian classical enthusiast I had composed a tune in standard Mohanam and my husband did an even better job of composing it in Kunthala Varali.  However the purpose of a personalized tune was this - the tune had to be distinct for one to recognize it in a crowd.

Today, any audio file can be converted into a Ring Tone.

- I have heard of Ringback tones and I think this is very attarctive and 'hip' for the next four years.  A Ringback tune/tone is what would be played by the receipient of your call.  Other than the usual touchy-warmy uses of a personalized ringback tune one can also use this for functional purpose I guess.  I would love to call my kids with a ringback tune 'Have you completed your home work' ? I think there is some money here to be made.

- I think the most flexible and useful feature would be SMS for a long time to come. It is non intrusive and very effective. One can use this almost for anything - collaborative applications can use SMS as text interface, document writing, getting scores, voting, applying leave, sending a build for compilation.....it's versatile.

- There will be more interest in Video blogging and video watching via Mobile. However providers (atleast Airtel, BSNL) should provide higher bandwidth for premium subscribers. If infrastructure (read bandwidth) is not improved, no application or feature will work effectively or earn revenue.

So, what are we looking forward to really? A highly personalized phone almost like your pet dog without which you would get withdrawal symptoms :-)