Hello Kitty May Be Key to 3G Survival

wa4osh writes "It's scary to think that sophisticated 3G mobile systems may depend for their survival on Hello Kitty (a cutesy Japanese pink cat with whiskers but no mouth) according to the recent Commdesign article "Hello Kitty may be key to 3G success". The article suggests that 3G's main market is downloading ringtones and backgrounds. Reading between the lines, it also suggests that 3G did not find a killer application. For example, what happened to 3G Video phones, or using 3G to send video clips to each other? These are all things that can be done with today's 2.5G technologies - GPRS and 1XRTT. So what's 3G really for? Perhaps Wi-Fi / 802.11 is solving the real need for broadband data mobility." The Wall Street Journal has an article which suggests that cellular companies are turning to Wi-Fi to hedge their bets.

Comments

Phone as a network portal

[yet another coward]

I want a cell phone that acts as a phone and as a gateway for my other devices. I should be able to connect my computer to it on the road. I should be able to connect my PDA to it. I should be able to connect a camera to it. It should have some of its own features. It should just work.

There are some Bluetooth enabled phones that almost meet these demands. They do not. Even when they come close, the networks are being built slowly.

Re:Streaming audio...

[stratjakt]

>> is one application that could take advantage of 3G.. who wouldn't want to turn their phone into a mp3 player with unlimited tunes? Oh um, and I don't know, about a zillion other things

Not for 6$ per half megabyte, they dont. And if they did, they no doubt already could.

Stupid hello kitty backdrops are the only thing most people could do with reasonable cost, and I think thats the point.

Moblogging, the G3 Killer App?

[dav]

A friend of mine in Tokyo recently bought one of those cell phones that can take movies and snapshots and email them to someone (over the G2(?) 144kbps link). So I had the idea to set her up with a blog and use procmail and xmlrpc to autopost her cell phone media captures to her blog.

Next thing I know, this concept is a big deal and I find similar systems popping up all over the place.

It seems to be an up and coming meme, and I imagine that this nascent meme combined with 3G speeds could really turn into something exciting.

almost everthing 3G can do on today GPRS/MMS

[Anonymous Coward]

MMS/GRPS in some coutries offerse already advanced multimedia services. In Italy, Wind offerst videostreaming of football actions from Serie A directly on Nokia7650 as they happen. They also offer sound streaming of music on the mobile and short video clips of most important news (vieonews). This is happening on 2.5G MMS networks. Upcoming nokia video-phones allow you more movie-clip functinality.
The advantage of pure 3G however are two:
1) allows wireless videoconferecing between two mobile users(which is not possible on 2.5G networks)
2) 3G UMTS interface allow multiple sessions so that you can handle video communication, sound, voice and other comm interactions all together. This is what the computer Desktop world calls 'Multitasking'.

Goodbye, Kitty - get me an IP address

[puzzled]

Children in Japan might find Hello, Kitty to be the driving force behind 3G, but here in Amerika I've got a 750k population metro just busting with possible mobile data applications, and the cellular carriers collective heads are so far up their poop chutes we'll have an 802.11b mesh with a node on every block before they figure it out.

The problem in a nutshell is this - they believe they'll make more (like 10x) more for mobile data and they think they can charge per bit. Users are staying away in droves and they'll continue to do so until mobile behaves like DSL/cable modem, or low speed frame relay. I'd happily shell out $99/mo for something that got me ISDN speed at home and everywhere else in town, but that rate for an account with a 20 meg/month cap is utterly useless.

So much that could be done and its a darned shame we have to stay in business whilst doing our artwork, isn't it?

Full Disclosure: I own an evil, rate shaping ISP, that persecutes P2P users in such a zealous fashion as to inspire the admiration for various third world dictatorships.

Hello Kitty May Be Key to 3G Survival

[stalinvlad]

Er PORN PORN PORN Why did VHS beat Beta? Why is TCP/IP the thing to learn and not ISO OSI? PORN PORN PORN! HEY MONKEY BOY WANNA FUCK EVERYONE BUT YER MUM? YER A MONKEY!!!! ps do you know what happens when you fuck your mum?

Dumb conclusion

[Fnkmaster]

The killer app for 3G wireless? Well, there are lots of them out there, but letting yourself get coupled to the idea of the cellphone as the correct outlet for them all is retarded. The network should not be usable only by an audio handset device. That's dumb.

Audio-on-demand. From anywhere you want. THAT will kick ass. MP3s have been one of the killer apps for the web. Being able to build a little MP3 player that can play MP3s, record them from the radio, AND stream any song you want over a 3G network - that will rock. Again, it's not a fucking cellphone. I want a small cellphone that I can talk into. Maybe a bluetooth headset would be nice. And an ultra-high density fuel cell to power the handset. But other than that, I am pretty satisfied with my cellphone as a thing I use to call people, not a thing I use for video, picture-taking or music-listening.

I mean, this stuff doesn't take much creativity to come up with. Sending phone-quality pictures to my friends from my cellphone? Eh. Not that impressive. Videophones? They've failed utterly though the technology has been there for years (and the bandwidth is actually there in many households for it to work quite well). No reason to think that video-cellphones will do better. People like cellphones because they can do other shit while they talk on them - I drive and use my cell all the time because I'm a BUSY fucking person (before I get flamed, I always use my handsfree set so I can devote most of my attention to the road).

So, in short, think of all the cool apps that could be built with 3G wireless bandwidth that ARE NOT cellphones. My car should have a GPS console, with integrated 3G wireless, that lets me search the web, auto-updates the map data (I don't know how the current car-GPS units do this). And audio-on-demand in the car - that would be great. Anyway, there are still things *I* can't do with *my* cell phone - real SMTP email access, real web browsing (not the current shitty excuse for this), download email attachments and view them - I suppose these examples are mostly 2.5G compatible apps, but the ones above seem to require 3G.

Re:Hello Kitty the Future? I don't think so.

[curious.corn]

> With Japan, there are no huge wide open
> spaces. No worries about long highways to
> provide expensive and infrequently used (but
> critical to getting customers) service to.Just
> slam home a cell tower every five blocks and
> bob's yer uncle.

Also, I understand in Japan there are no city squares. Anyone ever been to Rome, say Campo de' Fiori? All those people chatting face to face and hanging around before the pubs. Over here the real leisure use for cells is to coordinate friends to meeting points; no italian would survive a week without this kind of human interaction. Over there I think there's no urban infrastructure for people to easily meet face to face so they use 3G to make it up.