Mobile phone users know they can contact several friends at once simply by sending them a text message. But many feel that lacks the personal touch.
From today, however, they can get a handset which solves the problem by allowing them to send an instant voice message to any number of people at the same time.
Simply by squeezing a button on the side of the phone, they can turn it into a walkie-talkie.
The function - called Push to Talk - has arrived from the U.S., where it has already taken the market by storm. It is expected to be hugely popular with Britain's 47million mobile users.
To send a message, users select a name or names from the phone's list of addresses.
They then push the button on the side of the handset to record their message and release the button to send it.
Rather than hearing a ring-tone to signify an incoming call or a beep to report a new text message, the recipient hears the sender's voice message itself coming out of their mobile.
They can then reply in the same way.
To avoid embarrassment, the phones can be set to silent mode, holding messages in the memory while the recipient is, for example, in a meeting or in the cinema, for playback later.
If the phone is switched off it stores the voice messages and alerts the user once it is switched on again.
The software works by turning a spoken voice message into data, which is transmitted over the airwaves to an Internet server.
From there, it is routed to the recipient's mobile, where in a matter of seconds the data is turned back into voice.
David Chow, associate editor of the magazine What Mobile said last night: 'This has got huge potential.
'Text messaging is a great way of communicating but it doesn't have quite the personal touch of someone's voice, which you can put tone and emotion into.
'People are more likely to respond to a voice message than a text.'
Jason Chapman, principal mobile phone analyst at market researchers Gartner, said: 'It's sufficiently different and exciting and I think it has a very wide appeal.
'We are optimistic about the consumer use of it. From the point of view of young users in particular, it is another cool way of communicating with your friends.
'The youth market is very much into instant messaging already and I think they will adopt this new option very quickly.'
There is a huge market in instant messaging. Current figures from the Mobile Data Association show 55million text messages are sent in Britain every day.
The company behind today's launch, fastmobile, claims the flat £6.99 monthly fee for its ' fastchat' service will make it much cheaper for text-mad phone users.
It is also cheaper than the new picture messaging services.
James Tagg, European managing director of fastmobile, said: ' Messaging is one of the most obvious uses of a mobile phone. But no one predicted SMS ( Short Message Service - the official name for texting) would grow like it did.
'We see fastchat as a similar kind of service - something that people will discover and rapidly adopt, just like they did SMS.
'And one of the best things about fastchat is that groups of people can chat together - completely unlike SMS, which is just one-to-one.
' Push-to-talk messaging has become huge in the States and is still growing there. But the UK is even more message- mad, so it could easily become even more popular here than it is over there.'
The system currently works on the Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets and the soon-to-be-launched Sony Ericsson P800. But most new handsets coming out feature the facility.
Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens have already announced they are working on a standard for adding walkie-talkie features to phones.
It has already caught on in the U.S., where it has helped make Nextel the fastest-growing U.S. mobile operator.
Nextel earns about £12 a month more from each customer who also uses its Push to Talk service, prompting its rivals - AT& T Wireless, Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile - to announce plans to introduce Push to Talk this year. |
