Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Push to talk ; The mobile phone that lets you speak to all your friends at once

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 15:26:48 -0400

Push to talk ; The mobile phone that lets you speak to all your friends at once

Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)
Publication date: 2003-04-08

MOBILE phone users know they can contact several friends at once simply
by sending them a text message. But many feel that lacks the personal
touch.

From today, however, they can get a handset which solves the problem by
allowing them to send an instant voice message to any number of people at
the same time.

Simply by squeezing a button on the side of the phone, they can turn it into
a walkie-talkie.

The function - called Push to Talk - has arrived from the U.S., where it has
already taken the market by storm. It is expected to be hugely popular with
Britain's 47million mobile users.

To send a message, users select a name or names from the phone's list of
addresses.

They then push the button on the side of the handset to record their
message and release the button to send it.

Rather than hearing a ring-tone to signify an incoming call or a beep to
report a new text message, the recipient hears the sender's voice message
itself coming out of their mobile.

They can then reply in the same way.

To avoid embarrassment, the phones can be set to silent mode, holding
messages in the memory while the recipient is, for example, in a meeting or
in the cinema, for playback later.

If the phone is switched off it stores the voice messages and alerts the user
once it is switched on again.

The software works by turning a spoken voice message into data, which is
transmitted over the airwaves to an Internet server.

From there, it is routed to the recipient's mobile, where in a matter of
seconds the data is turned back into voice.

David Chow, associate editor of the magazine What Mobile said last night:
'This has got huge potential.

'Text messaging is a great way of communicating but it doesn't have quite
the personal touch of someone's voice, which you can put tone and emotion
into.

'People are more likely to respond to a voice message than a text.' Jason
Chapman, principal mobile phone analyst at market researchers Gartner,
said: 'It's sufficiently different and exciting and I think it has a very wide
appeal.

' We are optimistic about the consumer use of it. From the point of view of
young users in particular, it is another cool way of communicating with your
friends.

'The youth market is very much into instant messaging already and I think
they will adopt this new option very quickly.' There is a huge market in
instant messaging. Current figures from the Mobile Data Association show
55million text messages are sent in Britain every day.

The company behind today's launch, fastmobile, claims the flat pounds 6.99
monthly fee for its ' fastchat' service will make it much cheaper for text-mad
phone users.

It is also cheaper than the new picture messaging services.

James Tagg, European managing director of fastmobile, said: ' Messaging is
one of the most obvious uses of a mobile phone. But no one predicted SMS
( Short Message Service - the official name for texting) would grow like it
did.

'We see fastchat as a similar kind of service - something that people will
discover and rapidly adopt, just like they did SMS.

'And one of the best things about fastchat is that groups of people can chat
together - completely unlike SMS, which is just one- to-one.

' Push- to- talk messaging has become huge in the States and is still
growing there. But the UK is even more message- mad, so it could easily
become even more popular here than it is over there.' The system currently
works on the Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets and the soon-to-be-launched
Sony Ericsson P800. But most new handsets coming out feature the
facility.

Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens have already announced they are working on
a standard for adding walkie-talkie features to phones.

It has already caught on in the U.S., where it has helped make Nextel the
fastest-growing U.S.

mobile operator.

Nextel earns about pounds 12 a month more from each customer who also
uses its Push to Talk service, prompting its rivals - AT& T Wireless,
Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile - to announce plans to introduce
Push to Talk this year.

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnniw/Story.nsp?story_id=37947913&ID=cnniw&scategory=Business+and+Finance&

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