The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
February - 2010 - issue > Technology
Mobile Applications in India: Challenges and Opportunities
Chandu Sohoni
India boasts of 400 million (40 crore) mobile phone subscribers. Does that mean that many computing devices with Internet connectivity? Certainly not. The fact remains that most of the Indian mobile phones are used just to make and receive calls.
There are many challenges in making the mobile phone being used Internet enabled computing device. The biggest challenge is, of course, the phone language. We will keep the language problem aside for now and focus on the problems faced by English knowing mobile phone users.
If we leave out the miniscule percentage of users with BlackBerry, iPhone, or an N97 kind of device, the majority of the Indian users face serious problems in using their phone to access Internet like services.
Problems Faced by English knowing Mobile Application Users
The first problem is data connectivity; it is far too expensive, slow, and unreliable. The problem starts with simple things like Internet or GPRS settings on the phone. They just don’t work in spite of many calls to the operator care centers. If you get the data connection work, you would still find it expensive at 15 paise per 10 kb for the slow and unreliable connection that you get.
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