Joia Shillingford 

Here is the news

Read all about it! On your mobile. News services for mobiles are now more appealing - but will they succeed? Joia Shillingford reports.
  
  


Read all about it! On your mobile. News services for mobiles are now more appealing - but will they succeed?

Earlier this month, Orange began offering multimedia news clips to people with picture phones. Rivals Vodafone and O2 also plan a spot of photojournalism.

You get the story plus a photo sent as a text message for 25p. As well as general news, there are sports, quirky news and celebrity gossip.

T-Mobile in the UK says 20% of all connections to its Wap portal are for news. You can even buy mobiles with built-in radios if you want your news delivered in a conventional way.

People who get their calls via a personal digital assistant like O2's Xda probably have an appetite for longer stories because of the larger screens they use. They can also look at mobile versions of internet-based news services.

Hans Snook, founder of Orange and chairman of Carphone Warehouse, says: "Mobile news will appeal to anyone with a specific interest, where the quantity of information is not too great." Orange bought the web-based Ananova news service from the Press Association two years ago. It says customers have recently been able to register for up to 3,500 different categories of news and information.

Customers can opt for regular updates costing about 12p or get updates on demand. For example, you can send a text message saying INDX to the phone number 177 and get the current price of the FTSE 100 sent back. Users can also listen to cyberchick Ananova reading the news for 20p a minute. Virgin Mobile also has audio news. Dial 4321 on its service and you can call out the category you want.

The soaraway success for news service on mobiles today is football news, says Stephen Pang of mobile portal Vizzavi. Horoscopes get most hits on its site, followed by football scores, with news third.

Most operators sell football news packages. Carphone Warehouse has a package for the whole Premier League season for £29.99 (or £5.99 for a month). And it provides a choice of CNN, Sky News, BBC, the Guardian, and the Financial Times on its Mviva portal. Or, via SMS, you can get celebrity gossip from OK! or Formula 1 alerts.

"Use of mobile news leaps not just when the Premiership starts but also when there is a breaking story, such as September 11 or, more recently, the two missing schoolgirls," says Deborah Tonroe from Orange UK.

Alan Newman, a media specialist and managing director of Atos KPMG Consulting, says mobiles have a big advantage over the internet. "Customers expect to pay," he says, "whereas they see the net as free. This bodes well for mobile news, so long as it is not too general."

He suspects that operators will try to debit news payments from the customers' bank account separately from their main mobile bill so it does not seem so costly.

Pay-as-you-go could prove the most popular way of purchasing news on the move, as operators only charge for news that's highly relevant to the customer.

Or much quicker to obtain. "Mobile users want small amounts of information and they want them fast," says Elaine Devereux of T-Mobile.

She adds: "If you give out time-sensitive information, people will pay even if they can get it free elsewhere - but more slowly."

 

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