Mobiles and digital connectivity--problems

Looking at present statistics,mobiles seem to be the only gadget which has the highest penetration in India.Looking at the wide penetration of mobile phones,many experts are proposing to provide a host of services using the mobile phones.The service includes Internet connectivity mobile banking etc.No doubt the idea makes a lot of sense as it will provide access to a host of services to a wide array of citizens.But,I see two major problems with this idea.

(i)Low End Phones:-
Most of the phones being sold in India are entry level with very low computing power.They have very simple or no application processors with low computing power.The focus is more on the base band processing part for voice services.To run some applications,it needs to have a decent application processor.Looking at the current scenario,even mid range phones struggle to run ordinary applications.The so called higher end phones are exorbitantly costly.

(ii)Low speed Internet connectivity:-The supposedly 2.5 G services like GPRS provide very low speeds and practically unusable from mid range phones.Even if the connectivity is decent ,the data charges are exorbitant.Airtel charges 399 for downloading 500KB in Blackberry.

---Next post I will offer some solutions..