.Dust

In the past few years all oper­a­tors have started pop­u­lat­ing their mobile phone with branded appli­ca­tions in order to boost their data ARPU.

In the last few months they seem to be focus­ing on the mobile phone idle screen.

It’s quite easy to think at the mobile phone idle screen as the per­sonal com­puter desk­top. Actu­ally I think it’s really the equiv­a­lent of the per­sonal com­puter desk­top on steroids.

The main dif­fer­ence I see between the two is the fact that the cus­tomer will spend most of his time with his mobile phone in idle state com­pared to a small amount of he will spend on his desktop.

That’s the rea­son why oper­a­tors are focus­ing on this. Actu­ally I do not really under­stand why oper­a­tors did not start think­ing about this a long time ago. For most oper­a­tor it is a rel­a­tively new strategy.

Since the mobile phone and it’s appli­ca­tions are crit­i­cal for con­tent dis­cov­ery the idle screen is per­fect to pro­mote new con­tent and new ser­vices to customers.

From a tech­ni­cal stand­point the game is not easy at all.

• The com­plex­ity and vari­ety of mobile phones oper­at­ing sys­tem will need ded­i­cated port­ing of any idle screen appli­ca­tion. If you ever worked on some­thing like this you will under­stand how dif­fi­cult this is. If you have never worked on it, trust me, it’s a real nightmare.
• Mobile search has never been imple­mented in a good way by any oper­a­tor. Find­ing con­tent on a mobile por­tal is still hard and complex.

From a mar­ket­ing stand­point it is not yet still clear how mobile adver­tis­ing will impact this space. The idle screen is, obvi­ously, the best place where to show adver­tise­ment mes­sages. It’s the fastest way to catch cus­tomer eyes and, pos­si­bly, interest.

There is another big dif­fer­ence between the per­sonal com­puter desk­top and the idle screen of the mobile phone.

On the per­sonal com­puter desk­top you decide what to place on it while on the mobile phone idle screen the oper­a­tor will decide what will be sit­ting there.

So, the big ques­tion is: Who owns the idle screen?

I think that the cus­tomer should be the owner of the idle screen. Def­i­nitely there should be an appli­ca­tion on the idle screen but most of it has to be cus­tomiz­able by the cus­tomer and not imposed by the operator.

Why do I blog this? If the mobile is going to be per­sonal com­puter of the future it has to behave like that. Full stop.

Related posts:

1. My fat mobile phone
2. Please, run what I want!
3. Tech­nol­ogy is there
4. Friends gen­er­ated content
5. The def­i­n­i­tion of Smartphone