Full song downloads are expected to be a key driver in the mobile industry next year.

According to one 22-year-old university student, the reason behind it is boredom.

This is why she downloads mobile content such as songs and wallpapers and, although she does not consider herself a geek, she says her next mobile phone will have to have the maximum pixel level on the market, and it will also have to be a personal digital assistant (PDA).

She represents a rapid market evolution in which mobile-phone users have become more sophisticated and demanding.

Thananan Vilailuck, president of the major handset distributor Samart i-Mobile, believes that next year's trends will be more about pixels and bits. His company will concentrate on improving the image quality of its camera phones as well as the fidelity of phone-sourced music.

These things can be realised when the present bottleneck in handsets - their memory storage - is improved. Already, Samart i-Mobile has introduced an eight mega-pixel camera in its latest i-mobile 902. In addition, to encourage people to buy its phones, i-mobile has introduced i-Link. This value-added service allows unlimited access to news, sports scores, stock prices, foreign exchange rates, music, wallpapers and movie schedules at all Major Cineplex cinemas. The free "one click" service only expires when a user changes phones or service.

In an era when MySpace.com has been bought by News Corp and a blog has been made into a series of films (Salam Pax's famed Baghdad diary "Where Is Raed?"), Thananan is not afraid that consumer-generated content will eat away his company's mobile content business.

"Our i-mobile 612 actually allows you to edit a movie clip. It comes with the necessary software already installed," Thananan said. He believes that more consumer-generated content will actually spur the evolution of a "multimedia society".

True Move's multimedia service director Piroon Paireepairit said the existing "killer" contents - calling melody and full song downloads - will still be the star contents next year.

Only 20 per cent of more than 34 million Thai mobile-phone users have subscribed to calling melody services, which offer the melodic tunes that callers hear when waiting for calls to be picked up, indicating that there is still ample room for growth, he said.

Piroon said that next year cellular operators will heavily encourage a greater number of subscribers to download more full songs to make them familiar with the bandwidth-hungry content before the arrival of 3G wireless broadband technology. Due some time next year, 3G will enable users of compatible mobile phones to access data services at a blazing speed.

The country's largest cellular operator, Advanced Info Service (AIS), said the main contributors to the growth of its value-added business this year have included full song downloads.

The head of its wireless service business, Somchai Lertsutiwong, claims there have been 100,000 full song downloads per month this year from the AIS network, up from about 1,000 per month early last year.

Next year the market leader will focus on the segmentation concept, by joining with specific businesses in all sectors, to embed their content and services into AIS SIM cards.

For example, it will team up with movie firms to enable its "movie SIM card" users to easily download movie clips or reserve movie tickets.

Recently, AIS and its five new agency partners - the Nation Multimedia Group, INN, iTV, Reuters, and the Voice of America - have jointly launched a news-on-demand service enabling subscribers to directly access updated news with one click on the agencies' corporate icons on their mobile phones.

AIS has initially bundled the icons of the five agency partners in Nokia model E61 business phones that are available through AIS channels, but will expand the service to other phone models soon. Users of other high-end phones can download the icons directly from AIS.

Somchai said nine million new mobile phones would be available in Thailand next year. Half of them will feature a host of hi-tech functions. This suggests that there will be a greater number of phone users able to access existing and new services.

He believes the value of the mobile value-added service market will reach Bt28 billion next year, up from the forecast Bt23 billion this year.

He is not worried about the trend for consumers to create their own contents, or download free contents from some homepages, depending less on the services of the cellular networks. These consumers are just a small group of people, he said.

However, highlighting the trend, a 19-year-old university student who asked not to be named said that she has hardly downloaded any content from cellular networks since discovering that she can download them directly from some home pages, which offer them free of charge, directly to her Sony-Ericsson W 800i phone via its data link.

Content provider mTouche (Thailand)'s manager Charndet Phrommanee said mobile contents next year will be more about animated graphics and lengthy, streaming video clips. This content will grow according to the vast number of mobile phones now featuring high-speed data download functions.

Next year, his company will focus on offering lengthy streaming entertainment video clips that phone users can download for viewing anytime and anywhere.

He said SMS-based information services such as horoscopes, soccer match results and news updates are on a gradual upward path since users of a huge number of low-tech phones can sign up for them.

Ki Nan Tsui,

Sirivish Toomgum

The Nation