While researching for automotive products for TunerBargains.com, a website my friend and I owned, I ran across several auto magazines offering mobile wallpapers as a free incentive. While ring tones, screensavers and wallpapers are nothing new in the cell phone world, I couldn’t help but drawing similarity with the early internet days when websites would offer free desktop wallpapers. This is significant to the mobile world because of how the desktop world has evolved. In the beginning, websites didn’t know how to make money on the internet, so they offered free incentives such as free desktop wallpapers. The goal was simply to hope that free incentives can bring returned traffic. While free mobile wallpapers may not revolutionize the mobile industry, it is a good start.
However, the lack of a universal standards will make it difficult for content providers as mobile phones don’t all share the same basic specs, OS, screen-size and application support. This makes a universal rollout of anything free more costly as it has to be tailored to each phone specifically. For instance, I tried to download a wallpaper just to find my phone not supported in their database; same thing happened when I tried to sign up CellFire.com, a coupon service endorsed by my carrier Cingular, yet my phone was still not supported in their phone list.
The sooner the wireless providers, manufacturers and mobile software community come to a standard, the faster this industry will grow. So far, I like what I see from Microsoft in that at least all devices running Windows Mobile 5 shares the same uniformed standard whereby I can install the same mobile applications from Pocket PCs to Smartphones.
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