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June 30, 2005
T-Mobile Jumps Over The Wall
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
T-Mobile has become the first cellular operator to offer full Internet service on its mobile phones.
The service will be sold under the name Web'n'walk, with Google.Com as the designated home page. (Yeah, I know, in the real Internet world you could change the default to, say, http://www.corante.com/mooreslore. But one step at a time.) New devices, with larger screens, will also be sold as part of the campaign.
The decision is critical, because up until now all cellular providers have offered only their own "walled gardens," sometimes using a small i (for Internet, customers think) on their phones, but in fact offering only a tiny fraction of the Internet connectivity customers are used to.
But as phones move to offering true broadband speeds, and some users use cellular broadband on their PCs because of its better coverage, this is finally breaking down.
It will be interesting to see how, and when, T-Mobile starts advertising this feature, and what Verizon and Cingular will say (or do) in response. T-Mobile, while owned by Germany's formerly state-owned phone company, is the smallest of four major operators in the U.S.
Best of all, little Catherine won't be lieing anymore. With T-Mobile, you will get more.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business Strategy | Consumer Electronics | Internet | cellular | computer interfaces
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Brad Hutchings on June 30, 2005 12:44 PM writes...
Hmmm... I was going to make the point that my carrier, Sprint, already gives me full access to the Internet. So after jumping to this page on my phone and scrolling through 8 phone-formatted pages of your blogroll to get to the actual article and comments, I was unable to post comments. But there are actually forms that work in the web browser for my phone.
So, Dana, what you need to do is make a phone-friendly version of this site. All I had to do to get here was google for "Moore's Lore" on my phone. I even bookmarked it.
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on June 30, 2005 06:59 PM writes...
I think there is some confusion here. Every data enabled phone I have ever heard of will let you go to any URL you want. The sticking point has always been that the browser only supported WAP, not full HTML. So, you could only go to WAP compliant sites. Where the walled garden thing came in is the interface of the browser itself. It would load this menu of stuff (all links that were afiliated witht he carrier) that you would have to dig way down into to get to the place where you could enter a URL of your own. If T-Mobile is actually giving you something that looks like a traditional browser, where you can enter a URL at any time, that would be a big step in the right direction.
Permalink to Comment3. Wes Felter on July 1, 2005 12:31 PM writes...
I've been using Opera on a P800 with T-Mobile for a few years. It's good to see T-Mobile realize the potential of their own network.
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