Turning mobiles into walkie-talkies

The BBC has an interesting article on PTT enabled phones, questioning whether the walkie-talkie feature will make SMS obsolete. A concern raised in Textually before but not a serious one, I don't think. People talking on their cell phones is disruptive enough to everyone around them, but if hearing the voices of two people talking off and on becomes commonplace, it will be simply unbearable. A walkie talkie feature will never replace what is most appealing in text messaging in the first place, the silence, the discretion of it. In a meeting, in class, on the bus, in a waiting room or if you're just a kid, in bed when you should be sleeping...

Excerpts from the BBC:

"Push-to-talk has proved immensely popular in the United States, and Nextel, the mobile phone operator which dominates the US push-to-talk market, has 12 million customers for its service.

Last year US users sent over 62 billion push-to-talk messages, says Nextel.

Now a Chicago-based company, FastMobile, plans to launch a push-to-talk service called FastChat in the UK.

[...] Push-to-talk systems use the "always-on", low cost data network GPRS to send messages from one mobile phone to another, bypassing expensive voice networks, push-to-talk messages can be sent at a similar cost to a text message, even internationally.

The quality of the voice messages is the same or better than mobile phone calls because the messages are compressed just like voice calls, but less data is "lost".

Push-to-talk is not designed as a replacement to normal phone conversations, but as a quick and convenient alternative to texts.

It does away with the bother and expense of dialling a number, according to James Tagg, European Managing Director of FastMobile.

More than five billion text messages were sent in the first quarter of this year alone, according to figures from Oftel.

Many of the "meet me in the pub in 20 minutes" type of messages sent by the most active texters, 18 to 26 year olds, could be conveniently sent as push-to-talk messages."

For more on Push-to-Talk, check out this category in Textually.

emily | 10:36 AM | PTT (Push-to-Talk) |
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