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Sprint to offer local information search

Sprint to offer local information search

This from eWeek:

“Sprint Nextel Corp. said it plans on Monday to kick off a local directory cellphone service with information such as driving directions and movie times as it aims to boost revenue by having customers use their phones for more than just talking.

….the service from the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider may be the first with potential to create mass appeal as it is easy to use and was designed to work on 70 percent of the service provider’s roughly 48 million subscribers’ phones from the most expensive to the cheapest, according to analysts.

Existing services, including a local search service from the most popular Web search engine Google Inc., are more awkward to use on cellphones than the InfoSpace offering which was designed specifically for phones, the analyst said.

“What’s very elegant about what they’ve done is they’ve made it possible for me to search a wide range of information using just my thumb and a single button on the phone,” said Donovan, noting that if for example the user searches for a movie, details of nearby restaurants and ATMs are also shown.”

I took an informal poll of some family and friends and only 1 out of 10 people that I talked to actually use their cell phone for anything else than it’s original use. They are all aware of the fact that they can (kinda) get on the Web with their phone, but in the words of one survey participant: “The screen is too small to see anything!” So, in my opinion and backed up by some highly scientific data, anything that makes accessing the Web with our cell phones easier is a good thing.

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WendyBoswell

Wendy Boswell is the Editor for About Web Search and part of the New York Times Company.