State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Let me confess, I never wanted to be a BlackBerry user and ever since I was forced to use my first RIM device, I have always been carrying one, it’s been a few years now. I’m not that forgetful in general but I do forget my BlackBerry at places at times, and am usually not sure where I left it. Was that in my car or at home? Did I drop it somewhere or is it safe or not? Calling a lost phone to ring it, itself is an invitation to a thief if you left it at a public place. Does this happen to you too?

Read more »

Just recently Zong has come up with an application based e-mail service “Zong M@il“. The service enables Zong customers to access all their e-mail accounts on their mobile phone through an application client. Customers interested in staying connected to their email accounts can do it through Zong mail without necessarily having to buy high-end mobile handsets.

Read more »

Here are excerpts from a recent article which expressed concerns about mobile data pricing going from a simple fixed price (as offered to iPhone users in the US currently) to a more elaborate usage-based model. As an example, iPhone users get all you can use data plan for $30 which is competitive. I recently ran a poll on data usage and its results showed that many smartphone users in Pakistan consume over 100MB data each month.

Consider: A single YouTube viewing consumes nearly 100 times as much cellular bandwidth as a voice call. In Asia, some 200 million people already watch video on their smartphones. No wonder Google (whose YouTube unit serves up one billion videos a day) is an investor in a new undersea fiber line connecting North America to the Far East.

More omens: Data collector AdMob reports that mobile Web page requests grew 9% from July to August—a 180% annual growth rate. And Motorola recently went public with worries that a handful of mobile Slingbox users (a video streaming device) could wipe out cell service in a whole neighborhood.

Read more »

This poll is an attempt to analyze how many mobile users actually use the GPRS/EDGE based data services provided by the networks.

Those who you use such services, share your views. And those who do not use, give reasons in comments.

A cross post from Basit Ali’s blog

Today, Ufone has announced the launch of a very interesting service named UConnect. The service allows you to use your cellphone to control several activities on your PC. In addition to remote PC access the service combos Push-Email-over-SMS as well. It may sound a bit complex but in my initial experience I find the service very easy-to-use. No downloads and installation required on phone, no complex configurations, no issue of proxies and firewalls on your pc, in short, if you have data enabled phone, it’ll work just fine. Following is the list of main features of UConnect:

• Remote file access: You can access the files on your PC remotely. No download required on your phone and it all works on the mobile-browser.
• Remote access to your Outlook emails: Access your MS-Outlook emails on the go using the mobile-browser
• PC control: Allows you to restart, shutdown, hibernate, sleep and log off your machine.
• Multiple PC remote access: Above three features can be used on more than one PCs
• Push Email: Sends you SMS and Wap-Push notifications for every incoming email and you can configure up to 5 email accounts with it. You can even use it on a non-smart phone.
• 512 MB web-space: Each user will be allocated 512 MB space on the server.

How to subscribe?

Simply SMS SUB to 292 to sign up for the service.

How it works

• You can access the service on the phone by visiting http://uconnect.ufone.com on their mobile browser. Once signed up you can login and configure push email from here.
• You can download UConnect client software to be installed on your PC from http://uconnect.ufone.com that allows remote access on your phone.

Please download the user manual for further details.

Anticipation

I’ll come back on this blog with a detailed review of the product, its features and price later, but right now I’m really excited about this product. File sharing, remote file and PC access is something that has not been available earlier, at least as a VAS in Pakistan. Moreover, Push Email over SMS is a service that targets a big number of users and will help bring Email access to masses.

Please wait for the detailed review to follow.

We have all adored Warid’s Glow Package and now Warid brings another attraction for the prepaid tech savies – Prepaid GPRS Bucket. We had heard of SMS buckets but this thing is something new, perhaps a way the mobile industry gets a solution to the problem of rare data services usage by prepaid consumers. Allowing customers to pre-purchase the megabytes (or MBs like we call it) and top them off when the need arises.

Buy, use it all and buy again.

The offering is being positioned at a competitive price to facilitate prepaid customers for GPRS usage and allows a 30day validity period to the customer.The bucket gives the customer a total of 10MB of data capacity which has a validity of 30days from purchase. The customer is under complete freedom to procure a single or multiple buckets at any given time as required.

How to Subscribe:

To procure the GPRS Bucket from handset, the customer composes a message and sends the keyword “Data” to 3282.

Available for: The service is available for Prepaid customers with active GPRS services Only.

Subscription Charges: PKR 30 +tax