Well, most of us might have smartphones now but if you are ever planning to get back to your old mobile phone, you can forget about it not being a smartphone.
It has often been said that there is no smart phone, it’s the man using it who should be smart. That man or rather someone like him or maybe a group of men like him finally have a solution for our problem. Thanks to those at VascoDe, an Israeli technology company, we can now use our old or outdated phones to gain access to applications such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Skype without any software installation on our devices.
In fact, it is also very useful for a vast number of people, especially in developing economies, who still use simple and outdated phones without internet access. The system, brought to you by the good folks at VascoDe, promises to let users obtain apps available only for smartphone users through a cloud-based system that requires no downloads. It uses a text-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which is quite similar to the Short Message Service (SMS). Reportedly, this mobile interaction system works on all types of mobile phones.
This USSD system cannot be used to gain access to the internet. It is a highly remarkable system that utilizes the API (Application Programming Interfaces) which is available on the webpages pages of websites like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Wikipedia and many more. The one handicap that this system seems to have is that the pages will be available to user only in black and white. According to the CEO of this amazing company, more than 83 % of all the people in the world who use mobile phones are using simple devices that are incapable of connecting to the internet. That means that a huge majority of mobile phone users, a whopping four billion people, are unable to check their email while on the move.
These people, or at least those of them who wishes or are forced to use simple mobile phones, can now access their email accounts and updates on social networking websites. It has been reported that a huge market for this system lies in developing economies like Brazil, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, where most of the people cannot afford a computer much less spend their hard-earned money on an internet connection. Nevertheless, most of them are forced to dole out hard cash from their pockets to log into their email accounts or surf the internet in expensive coffee shops.
It can open up a world of possibilities for these people and others like them who are stuck with their old mobile phones or choose to stick with it. However, its date of release has not been finalized yet. But the company promises that the charge for this service is considerably lower than the data package offered by telecommunication companies.
