Sunday, June 20, 2010

WP7 Marketplace Limit download size over 3G

I was looking at the Teched sessions and one of the aspects that cut my interest was the limit for application download using 3G network (maximum 20MB). It's a choice that Apple made and from my experience with the end user they are loosing clients for some applications. For example A friend of mine that owns an iPhone, uses it, loves it but is not able to connect it to a PC via iTunes. It's not said that somebody that will own a WP7 will also know how to connect it to a PC (it's a sad reality but it's like this). A lot of people will buy a "trendy" phone but don't know how to use a PC, or more are not interested in connecting the phone to the pc.
Another scenario would be that I am in a town, don't have a car navigator but I need to arrive in some place in town and I don't have an internet connection besides the one my WP7. In this case I would happily pay 40Euro to download TomTom with Italy map and I would wait 5-10 minutes to download it (download size around 400MB).
So why "block" the user buy applications that they are interested/need it? The price in Italy for unlimited data traffic it's really small (Tim Italy offers unlimited unlimited data transfer from for just 2 Euro/week but only from the phone)? Ericsson declared that the world wide data traffic over the cellular network surpassed the voice traffic.
If battery it's a problem wait for the user to connect the power plug. I personally would prefer not to power up my pc, connect the phone and download the application especially if it doesn't matter if I download using 3G or ADSL. You are also cutting off the users that don't have internet at home but have the latest phone on the market in their pockets and those are the users for which the price doesn't really matter.

The only reason I can think of is if the voice provider Vodafone, T-Mobile is imposing a maximum download size (it would be strange, but also in that case I cannot believe that all the providers have the same conditions).


So my way would be WARN THE USER but if he agrees DON'T LIMIT HIM

Namaste

5 comments:

  1. Sounds logical to me.

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  2. A 400MB 3G download would last more than 5-10 minutes ! It would take more than 2 hours.

    And even if the user can't connect his mobile to his PC, he will be able to download the app with Wifi.

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  3. If you use this page (http://www.hellkom.co.za/pages/download-time-calculator.php) to calculate you will get an estimated time of 9 minutes. Let's double it and you get 20 minutes which is reasonable for a person that doesn't even know to connect a WiFi (I know a lot of people that don't know what WiFi is but have the latest phone). The only thing that I say is WARN and DON'T LIMIT. Why limit the user?

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