Text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication, as high costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing fancier applications, industry players say, according to an AFP report.
As revenue from voice service narrows, mobile operators are hard pressed to find a key new application that will continue generating cash like the simple yet still popular SMS, or text messaging.
One solution is to enrich the content of text messages by adding voice greetings or templates, industry experts, quoted by the AFP report, say.
The ultimate aim is to let mobile users do with great ease on their handsets what they normally do on personal computers: chatting via instant message and sending e-mails, analysts and industry executives say.
'The challenge is that voice revenues are declining"&brkbar;The big success story is SMS,' said Joe Woods, an executive vice president at fastmobile, a firm that has simplified sending text messages, instant messages and e-mails from a mobile phone with just one log-in and across multiple portals like Yahoo and MSN.
Teyew Sin Siew, head of telecom research at Frost and Sullivan, said that in 13 Asia-Pacific markets including China and India, mobile data contributed about 20% of annual mobile revenue. Of the 20%, up to 90% was from text messaging.
'Voice and SMS are contributing more than 90% of the mobile revenue"&brkbar;When you can combine these two and make it simple, you have a value proposition to the end-user. Voice revenues are declining and everybody is looking at data services in terms of new value-added services,' Teyew told AFP.