April 23, 2005
The first mobile phone election
This is going to be the first general election when many of Brits get the results on their mobile phones. The BBC reports.
"The BBC's figures show that for the first time five million pages of news and information are being accessed each week in a mobile format.
"People have their mobile phones with them all the time, everywhere they go. And so increasingly it's how they get news," says a spokesperson for the Mobile Data Association.
The growth in mobile phone news "comes on the back of internet news", says Mr Brown, where people have become accustomed to directly accessing the information they want - whether it's a football score, news headlines or the weather.
Mobile phones are also popular with the politicians fighting this year's contest. Tony Blair has repeatedly been seen having his photograph taken by mobile phone cameras.
The Blair years have also been the mobile phone years. When Mr Blair entered office in 1997, only about one in six of the adult population had mobile phones. By the end of last year, an average of 78 million text messages were being sent every single day.
If the mobile phone has become one of the dominant cultural icons of the era, then the format for news looks like it could also be influenced. We want push-button, customised news on the subjects that interest us.
It's still the news. But this time it's personal.
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