Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Judging by Telstra's own figures, the TelstraOne Experience UI delivered on some phones may be doing more for the company than for users. It's apparently adding more than 10% to customers' monthly bills.
The TelstraOne Experience is a user interface that the carrier provides on mobile handsets from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, and potentially those from other vendors.
"Data and content revenue on TelstraOne Experience handsets is more than 11 per cent higher than on the identical handset model we compared," said Ross Fielding, executive director Telstra product management.
Personally, I'd be more impressed if a custom UI cut my bills, not increased them. But then customers and suppliers are often at odds.
Given the relatively high cost of mobile data, I don't think that increasing data use by almost 7% is much to boast about.
Another self-serving aspect to TelstraOne Experience is that it has led to an eightfold increase in Sensis search usage, simply by moving Sensis to the home screen.
"We brought Sensis search up from a sub menu and integrated it with the home screen on TelstraOne devices. And as a result we've achieved a much higher utilisation because customers don't need to hunt through sub menus to find the search engine," said Fielding.
If a particular search engine is that easy to reach - especially on a handset where text entry isn't as convenient as it is on a notebook or desktop PC - then as long as the results are at least reasonable, users are unlikely to take the extra trouble to use the engine they would normally prefer.
That's acknowledged in PC browsers. Even Internet Explorer makes it easy for you to switch between (say) Google and Bing. I don't know what proportion of users never change the setting, but my recollection is that when I last installed IE8 it let me set my preferred search engine.
Anyway, if you do like the sound of TelstraOne Experience, it's just become available on a pair of prepaid phones: the $A179 Sony Ericsson Naite, and the $A199 Sony Ericsson T707.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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