It’s just after 3:30 am here in Singapore and I’m headed to the airport soon to catch a 6:45 flight back to Tokyo. I’d be starting to rethink the “travel ain’t so bad after all” statement that I made the other day — except for the fact that I saw something here that made me remember one of the other not-so-bad things about traveling: It provides some nice surprises now and then.
One particular surprise of this visit came in the form of a TV commercial for Singtel’s mobile data services.
The commercial showed a woman standing in around in some public place outdoors in the city, obviously waiting for somebody who hadn’t shown up. The voice-over says something like, “So your date has stood you up and you’re standing around with nothing to do…” and something else implying the idea of “don’t let yourself get stuck in this situation”.
So then the commercial cuts to a scene that instead shows the same woman spending her stood-up-for-date waiting time productively: She’s now shown using a Nokia E61 — what’s more, what she’s doing on it is browsing the Web on it. And she’s shown not browsing a WAP site, but browsing a full Web site using what I guess is Nokia’s WebKit-based S60 browser. The implication from the voice-over and the images is that the value of the device is that it’ll let you get to any Web content you want, any where you want, any time you want (hey, that idea sounds familiar for some reason…).
That one commercial had the effect of raising my appreciation for Singtel about 1000 percent. I can’t say that I have seen (or even know of) any carrier in the world running TV commercials to encourage users to do browsing of the full Web from their mobile devices — but here’s hoping there will be more of them.
The E61 seems to be a very popular device in Singapore these days. My friend Lucian Teo has one, and I spotted a number of other users in the wild here.
By the way, the little Web-standards event that Lucian and I both spoke at went very well. Great presentation from Lucian, and some great questions from the audience. I’ll write up some more about it once I get back home.
I’m hoping I’ll get back to Singapore again soon. Hopefully my next visit will bring some even nicer surprises than the Singtel browse-the-full-Web-on-your-mobile commercial…
January 17th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Hi Mike, was great working with you guys.
The E61 is popular because it’s the best value for money. :) You save up to $300SGD if you extend your contract with Singtel. While Singtel promotes the use of the ubiquitous web, the rates for data via 3G are still too high. Singapore is aiming to have free wireless island-wide for the next 3 years, so wifi may be the way to go in these parts.
If only the wifi weren’t so sloooow.
January 17th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
I saw the E61 the other day in HK, and I fell in love with the machine. I read a few reviews, and it looks like a winner, so far. The model I saw had a QWERTY/Chinese keyboard, which would be a totally nifty toy to play with – since I have been inputing Chinese so far only in pinyin or jyutping, depending on the dialect. I’d love to learn a new sinogram-related hack :-)
Besides, it’s a Nokia, and I can install Python on it – and input code with a real kbd – maybe…
Now, I am disappointed to hear the wifi is slow… grmbl
January 18th, 2007 at 2:40 am
dda, it’s Singapore’s free wifi that’s slow, not the E61. The phone rocks, really!
January 19th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Seems Singtel isn’t so much paradise after all according to this report. If they don’t play nice with Mac users, I feel sorry for the Linux users. I woner if it allows Opera to sign up and log-in. Anyone tried?
January 21st, 2007 at 9:39 am
Lucian: good to know about the wifi speed. I guess I am sold now :-)
February 24th, 2007 at 9:02 am
No, wifi is pitifully slow on the E61, unless I’m doing something wrong. It takes about 30 seconds to download 200kb, its barely faster than GPRS :( I saw some reviews that sad web browsing didnt feels sluggish at all, but at home on my own network browsing is horrid :(