State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Jehan Ara wrote an interesting post about her successful but stressful struggle to activate her personal iPhone and then taking it to Telenor to realize that “Telenor Smart Mail did not support the iPhone”. That led me to the question which I pose to all of iPhone fans in Pakistan: which mobile company is best for iPhone users in Pakistan?

Till recently iPhone did not support the corporate email but here’s a video which shows that Apple has aggressively addressed this shortcoming and also added some other missing but highly in-demand features such as calendar, address books. Watch the game demo too. And hey, there’s the $100 million dollar fund to create some more cool apps. BlackBerry - watch out!

One of the premiere events of mobile and wireless industry, GSM annual meeting is a place to watch for trends. In the event hosted at Barcelona last month, Yahoo got the award for mobile portal, Grameenphone for social cause (note the familiar logo) and SonyEricsson got the award for mobile device. The full list of winners for 2008 can be viewed here.

Best Mobile Handset or Device
SonyEricsson: W910 Walkman Phone
3UK: 3 Skypephone - Highly Commended

Best Use of Mobile for Social & Economic Development

Grameenphone: CellBazaar

Best Mobile Game

Cellufun: Call of the Pharaoh
Glu Mobile: My Hangman

Best Broadcast Commercial
Safaricom: M-PESA ‘Send Money Home’ campaign

Best Mobile Advertising
Crossmedia Avenue: AMF Pension – the MMS campaign

Best Use of Mobile for Social & Economic Development
Grameenphone: CellBazaar

Best Network Quality Initiative
RAD Data Communications: LA-130 Cell Gateway - Cost-Effective HSPA Backhaul

Best Service Delivery Platform
Aepona: Aepona Telecom Web Services Platform

Best Billing and Customer Solution
Bharti Airtel: mChek on Airtel – Mobile Payments Service

Best Mobile Music Service
Omnifone: MusicStation

Best Mobile Video Service
mywaves

Best Mobile Social Networking Service
BuzzCity: myGamma.com

Best Mobile Infotainment Portal for News/entertainment
Yahoo! Connected Life: Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0

Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Service
Microsoft: Windows Mobile 6

Best Mobile Messaging Service
Seven: System Seven 7.0

The GSMA Chairman’s Award
Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder, Chairman & Group CEO Bharti Enterprise

Good news for all the videogamers out there who want to play games even when holding nothing more than a cell phone.

Nokia Corp. is ramping up its push into videogames on mobile phones, underscoring efforts by the world’s largest cellphone maker to move into adjacent businesses, as reported by WSJ here.

It plans to launch a phone this summer that is enhanced for users who want to play videogames, say people familiar with the plans. The device will look similar to the company’s other high-end phones but will have game keys, among other features to make it more fun to play.

Remeber N-Gage? That clunky gadget was a disaster for Nokia (they stopped selling it in second half of 2006) so they should be more careful this time around. Nokia is also trying to provide for navigation system features in phones (6110 Navigator).

Nokia stated that it will launch a service which lets user download games on their phones this September. Only N95 and N73 are designed to work with this service.

One challenge for Nokia and others is a short-age of high-quality videogames for cell phones. There is not a whole lot of interesting games from game companies for cell phones. Nokia is working with two of the largest game publishers focused on the mobile market, Electronic Arts and Gameloft SA.

Have you ever been in a situation when you are stuck somewhere with time to kill and you start exploring whats on your phone and end up playing a game on your phone? If it has been a while that you played games on a small gadget then you may be in for some surprise. Mobile gaming experience has become much better over the last couple of years due to better processing power.  As noted by eMarketer: The potential value of the mobile gaming market goes beyond the dollars earned from sales of games themselves. Users who play games on their phones spend more money on wireless phone services overall, and in-game ads and the branding power of games will make mobile gaming a strategically important tool for advertisers and marketers

Business recorder recently reported that Warid launched new Mobile Games. Warid claims to be the first to introduce 3D mobile games in Pakistan. Warid mobile games users will have a possibility to send their data to the global table for a truly unique experience. The Mobile Gaming part of Warid’s web site offers many choices and allows users to choose games for their handset.

Hamid Farooq, Chief Executive Officer, Warid Telecom said, “This experience will delight sensations for all video-gamers with its comprehensive list of 10 genres: Action, Adventures, Platform, Classic, Multiplayer, Sports, Pacing, Branded, 3D Games and Strategy.”

Rivals of Warid also have games for their users. Telenor games and instructions to download are here. Mobilink also offers some basic games - you can see their list here.

As explained at Wikipedia, Mobile games are developed using platforms and technologies such as Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian OS, Macromedia’s Flash Lite, DoCoMo’s DoJa, Sun’s J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition, recently rebranded simply “Java ME”), Qualcomm’s BREW (Binary Runtime for Wireless) or Infusio’s ExEn (Execution Environment). Other platforms are also available, but not as common. Java was initially the most common platform for mobile games, however its performance limitations have led to the adoption of various native binary formats for more sophisticated games.

For more about the current news and views about mobile gaming, see mobilegames.blogs.com.