Push to Talk Service Gets UK Retail Presence

The push-to-talk application developer, fastmobile has announced a commercial alliance with Wizcom, part of UK's Caudwell Group to resell its product in Phones4u retail stores. The service will initially be sold on Symbian OS compatible phones, but plans are in hand to dramatically increase the number of handsets in time for the Christmas sales boom.

fastchat combines a unique private walkie-talkie style instant voice messaging feature with the latest multimedia messaging capabilities (including picture, video, email and text) into one easy-to-use application that allows subscribers to chat with friends across mobile carriers, handset models and also to PCs globally.

John O'Boyle, European Marketing Director of fastmobile, said: "This is a major first not just for Wizcom and fastmobile, but for UK customers as it now makes the walkie talkie on your mobile vision a reality. Walkie-talkie conversations can now be held on compatible GPRS handsets across all the main UK networks and internationally.

"It could easily generate as fundamental a change to our communication habits as first email, and then SMS has. Regardless of all the other mobile firsts, fastchat will certainly be one of the killer applications for this year, and for the foreseeable future. Today's announcement is merely the first in a series of launches that secures our position as the leading provider of push-to-talk and other innovative mobile communications applications to both mobile operators and distributors worldwide."

Ian O'Reilly Wizcom Director, the mobile value added services arm of the Caudwell Group adds "The push-to-talk communications feature has been very successful in the US. Our launch of fastchat will be one of the first applications to truly use the always-on capabilities of GPRS in the UK and we believe strategically that this type of application is exactly the type of service that will produce incremental revenues in the consumer market."

The service requires no special hardware to be added to either the mobile handsets or the operators' networks, and does not affect other network operator services. It will be sold as an application to existing phones and as a value added service to new purchasers."

Posted to the site on 9th September 2003