We did a simple trial late last year to explore the possibilities of J2ME applications for instant messaging in Uganda. While it is easy to come across pricing data from the networks, it is much harder to access data on numbers of J2ME enabled handsets (and rate of increase) and availability of data services in Uganda or Kenya.

While things worked fine in Kampala, we found outside of the city the service was a lot less reliable. Fring and MXiT both lost the connection several times (on my pre-paid MTN SIM) and spent a lot of time re-connecting to the network. This resulted in much higher data usage (and hence cost) than when in Kampala.

Without more data it is hard to understand what type of investment is needed for J2ME applications to be useful in Uganda or Kenya. We now plan to do a larger trial with users across the country. Combined with a simple survey of the handsets used by people in our partner NGOs, we may then be in a position to look at a larger project.

However, my feeling it that for now, this is something more of use to development professionals. It seems a while before this will be a viable channel for communicating with the general public (particularly those at the bottom of the pyramid).

my calculations are based on real prices, pre-paid. so the 44x is not too far off. I also heard some pretty good stories about GPRS connectivity outside of Kampala. Kampala itself is worse, because of local overload. Overload is good, it means there is room & money for improvement.

I am of the opinion that far too much development money is currently poored into SMS projects. If J2ME is the new standard in commercial land, then why not push the new Mozilla mobile browser for example, and make sure that it meets African standards (like, lots of compression, localisation, translation)
That, plus some proper education towards webdevelopers for creating mobile websites, and suddenly the ecosystem for reaching out into the sticks becomes so much bigger than with the few SMS apps, that either suck up development money, or worse, users money.

I am just waiting until UNICEF, Grameen, Oxfam and whoknows have decided that SMS is not sexy anymore. Cant last long, i’m sure.

(and you, in the west, keep on throwing those old J2ME enabled phones away. They really help here!)