3 in the UK has announced a pretty killer suite of services on your choice of two high end mobile devices… Why the hell don’t we see anything like this in the US? VCast and MediaNet are not the same … the addition of Skype and means that 3 is savvy enough to realize that people are going to figure out how to do this stuff (when the symbian clients are officially released) so you might as well buy it from them.
I don’t have any experience with the SE Walkman phones, other than about 1 min of hands-on with a former colleague’s, but the Nokia N73 rocks.
Hutchison, more commonly known as 3 in the UK, today announced a partnership with Skype, Sling Media, Yahoo, Nokia, Google, eBay, Microsoft, Orb and Sony Ericsson. The idea is to bring all of these services on to your mobile for a flat rate fee — it’s been dubbed ‘X-Series’.
According to the hype, you’ll get free Skype-to-Skype calls to any PC or other X-Series user worldwide, be able to search on Google and Yahoo, send MSN instant messages to your friends, watch your TV from a Slingbox, access your computer at home with Orb and buy or sell stuff on eBay.
So far the only thing getting between the majority of consumers and the mobile Internet has been the cost of accessing online content and the limitations of certain sites on certain handsets. 3 says it is going to eradicate these problems by charging a set fee and making sure that its handsets support the content properly. The first handsets to be sold on the X-Series plan will be the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman phone. [Crave at CNET.co.uk:]
Technorati Tags: 3, Google, Marketing, Mobile, MSN, N-Series, N73, Nokia, Sling Media, Sony Ericsson, Yahoo
I think when these services are successfull in UK, US will notice this and offer similar services.