Mobile fatigue on the rise

Ever wondered what all those fancy acronyms mentioned on your mobile-phone package stands for? Gave up trying to send that video clip you just shot after it failed on the first attempt.

Don't worry, you are not alone, according to a 15-country survey by Smarttrust Mobile, a leading mobile services consultant with a client base of around 200 operators around the world.

According to the survey, Trends Guide 2005/06, reports customers being put off from using new data-based services""designed to bolster operators' sagging revenues""due to the complexity of operating new services and features.

"Consumers are struggling to keep pace with the rapid deployment of new handsets and services as well as complex pricing structures and poor usability," the survey says, calling the trend "mobile service fatigue."

According to the survey, while mobile operators, particularly in the West, have been providing subsidies on feature-rich handsets, only around 43 per cent of the phones with MMS capability have been used to end even a single multimedia message.

"In a large percentage of cases, the service just didn't work because of the poor handset configuration and network settings," said Tim De Luca-Smith, Smarttrust's communications manager in a release. "There is a real need to make such services more intuitive and remove concerns about reliability and pricing," he pointed out.

The survey by the Sweden-based organisation found that despite all the avances in Data-based services, SMS still remains by far the most frequently used non-voice application on mobile phones. "80 per cent of the consumers in Asia and Europe used SMS at least once a week," the report pointed out, "though, in the US, the figure is around 15 per cent."

It identified a problem-free MMS (Multimedia Messaging) and music downloads as the killer stand-alone data applications of the future, though India and China bucked the trend by putting games over music.

"In Europe, 40 per cent of the users were interested in using mobile music services while in Asia it was around 38 per cent and 20 per cent in the US," the report noted.

It also identified a threat to stand-alone data services like MMS which allow users to send pictures and video clips from internet access, noting that in many cases consumers were simply attaching their pictures to their emails, resulting in lower revenue for the operator.