September 10th, 2008 by Mordy Gilden
New mobile startup Smart Touch which launched at TechCrunch 50 today wants to offer information services to your phone (such as twitter updates and google searches), but without requiring the use of a data plan.
How, you ask?
By using SMS.
Now, many basic featured cellphone users are already familiar with the concept of using SMS for information instead of data. You can ask Google a question by texting 466453 (spells google) or even search and purchase a product from Amazon by texting 262966 (spells amazon). MoPocket’s own Justin Oberman regularly discusses how texting is used for marketing and campaigning, so this shouldn’t be news to anyone here.
Clearly, this is a popular and useful technology that Smart Touch is tapping, and hopefully taking a step further.
Their product, which just launched at Tech Crunch 50, states the following in their literature:
SmartTouch is a FREE mobile application that gives you access to branded contents and services without having to pay for a data plan. Our powerful, mobile widget-platform uses text messaging to provide you with a seamless, graphic and intuitive user-experience, creating richer interactions with the brands you know and trust.
After reading this, I was very excited by the concept… deliver a graphic and intuitive interface to an otherwise text-only medium?
I suddenly had flashbacks of the way MIME introduced file attachments to emails (which are inherently text only), and became a seamless standard for email clients in the mid 90s.
I began to picture a mobile delivery system that encodes content, such as images or applications, into short bursts of 160 bytes at a time and delivers them to the phone via your less expensive SMS plan.
Well, I guess I started getting ahead of myself. Despite how Smart Touch’s marketing sounds, it does not do any kind of content encoding. Rather it does something much more simple and elegant-
Smart Touch uses regular SMS services such as Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc (as mentioned earlier), and slaps a more user friendly GUI onto it. Each service has its own customized look and appropriate options which Smart Touch calls Widgets.
While not as ground breaking as I had imagined, this could prove very useful to people who use such SMS services regularly. You don’t need to remember the names of commands because the application presents you with the possible choices. All you need to do is select the service and follow the prompts. It also intercepts the message before it appears in your SMS inbox, thus keeping your inbox clutter-free.
The problem?
Right now this software is Windows Mobile only. While SMS information services are popular amoung standard phone users, a vast majority of smartphone owners also subscribe to data plans.
The SMS information platform may be useful, but a full blown html browser is far more powerful. If given the choice between the two, I think most people would prefer straight-up data.
Another possible problem I found is that it automatically intercepts these incoming service messages whether you sent the request from their application or not. For example, lets say that instead of opening up the Smart Touch program, I just opened my SMS composer to send a message to Google (466453) directly. The response comes up as a prompt to open the Smart Touch program, not in my messaging inbox. I suppose if you want to use this application for everything, this is fine, however sometimes I’d like to have the choice to do it the old way.
Also, I found the interface doesn’t follow the standard Windows Mobile window layout in regards to scroll bars. The result is that finger-scrolling add-ons such as ftouchlo or HTC’s bio-touch do not work.
The Good: If you are a fan of SMS information services and happen to be using a WM phone, Smart Touch can make the experience a little more user friendly by offering a graphical menu-driven environment.
September 15th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Mordy,
Great writeup. You’re right SmartTouch’s obvious target market is for people with mass-market phones who don’t want to pay the added cost of a data plan.
In the meantime, I think we’ll see a number of SmartPhone users with data plans accessing SmartTouch specifically for it’s ease of use in getting targeted information quickly and efficiently. The kind of information SmartTouch gives access to mirrors what most people use their phones for: utilitarian tasks (e.g. local search, weather, directions, banking, sports scores, etc) and for short snippets of information (e.g. checking facebook friends’ status updates, news/entertainment headlines, etc)
It’ll be interesting to see how this angle plays out until our mass-market phone launch. Anybody else using SmartTouch be sure to let us know what you think! We love our users and can’t get anywhere without YOU.
-Craig
September 18th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
“In the meantime, I think we’ll see a number of SmartPhone users with data plans accessing SmartTouch specifically for it’s ease of use in getting targeted information quickly and efficiently”
The problem is, sms service responses are generally far slower than data. Even 2G GPRS data has a latency of less than a couple of seconds, which means a mobile formatted web page will be available almost instantly. In my experience, sms response systems generally have a delay of 10-20 seconds (as I’m writing this, I tested an sms to google which responded after 14sec). This may not seem like much, but when dealing with interactive responses that require more than what fits in the first message (my desired result was on page 3, and to move to the next page you have to enter “next” and wait again), the amount of time you need to spend to get the information you want can hardly be considered quick or efficient(didn’t have the info I was looking for until almost a full minute later. In less than half of this time I could easily have opened google maps and found what I wanted).