New Nokia Development Permits Internet Access via SMS

With phones such as the Nokia N97, accessing the internet is a piece of cake; in fact the N97 is as much about internet access as it is about telephony, and it is possible to access the internet at speeds that were once only a fantasy. It is not the same the whole world over though; in many of the regions of the world that are not as developed as the West, for instance in India, today's modern Smartphones are simply not economically viable and though there are many mobile phone users, their phones are almost exclusively basic models.

In order to overcome this restriction, Nokia Research is developing a complete new communications protocol that will allow basic mobile phones to connect to the internet through SMS. Using this technology they have built applications that are very similar to Facebook.

In one of these applications, a user can just send a text message in order to find if any of their friends are in the vicinity. The server would receive this text, then see which friends were connected, and determine their location from the cell to which they were connected. The server would then compile a list which it would return to the requestor.

As there is a limit to the number of characters permitted in a text, a new syntax has been developed that allows a large amount in information to be coded in a small number of characters.

The special resolution is not as good as the ten metres that is available to GPS users, and in congested regions such as cities it is unlikely to be better than three hundred meters, but in most instances that is adequate.

This is a huge breakthrough for regions like India where there are an estimated 400million Indians equipped with mobile phones compared to only 30million with computers.

The Nokia Research Centre is located in Palo Alto, California, USA and the work is being led by Umesh Chandra, who moved to the USA from India in 1994.