Mobile e-mail and data backup to reach the masses this year

Synchronica‘s CEO Carsten Brinkschulte thinks that 2007 will be the year when both mobile email and backup and restore for mobile devices come of age for the mass market. We will see mobile email taking off in the consumer space, due to the advent of industry standards, lower cost devices and falling service plan costs. And we will also see consumers paying service providers an additional monthly fee to insure their mobile phone’s address book against loss or theft.

Mobile email

Until now, mobile email has been mainly limited to the BlackBerry subscribers who can afford to buy an expensive device and are willing to accept a costly data plan. But there have been strong signs over the course of the last year that the age of mobile email for the masses is almost upon us. The combination of industry standard adoption, lower cost devices and affordable service plans is set to make mobile email for the mass market a reality in 2007.

One or both of the two complementary mobile data synchronization industry standards – Push IMAP and SyncML – have been adopted by all the major device manufacturers and middleware vendors in 2006, which sets the scene for standards-based push email between heterogeneous mobile devices.

With such a wealth of mass market devices that support mobile email now available, the time is right for mobile email pricing plans to fall, to attract more customers. And as customer numbers increase, we will see mobile email start to replace text messages, becoming the next generation of SMS. Interestingly, SMS messages are relatively expensive when compared on a “per character” basis to alternative forms of messaging such as mobile email, so data tariffs per character for mobile email should not prove prohibitive to even the most cost-conscious of mobile phones users.

Backup and restore

We also expect to see a surge in demand from consumers for a backup and restore facility for their mobile devices in 2007. Already back in 2004 the research group Zelos found that 15% of mobile subscribers expressed a strong need for a mechanism to back up contact data. This is because consumers – and particularly the MySpace generation – depend increasingly on their mobile devices as the primary repository for vital information such as phones numbers and addresses.

In this scenario, if a person’s phone is lost or stolen, all his or her friends’ and family’s contact details disappear with it. For this fast-growing section of society, it is the information on the phone, rather than the phone itself, which is of value to them.

We will therefore see an increase in demand for a low-cost facility from service providers – a kind of insurance policy for your contact information – which will allow consumers to backup and restore their contacts information over the air. As well as providing a safety net for consumers who lose their phones, a backup and restore service also makes upgrading to a new phone easier. Customers simply use the backup and restore facility to transfer their contact information and saved SMS messages over the air to their new phone.

Conclusion

In summary, 2007 will see the mass market benefiting from recent advances in data synchronization and messaging. Mobile email will start to replace some of the billions of SMS messages that get sent every month by consumers and more service providers will begin to offer their subscribers a robust over-the-air backup and restore facility for their contacts information.