Banking on the success of push-to-talk mobile phone services, Sprint Nextel recently announced a walkie-talkie service for sharing photographs.
The company touted its Nextel Direct Send Picture service as giving PTT users the ability to display pictures taken with the camera phone on the screens of the recipient’s and sender’s screens simultaneously. The voice conversation can continue while the picture is displayed, Sprint said in a statement.
The company said that the service is aimed at business users who discuss events and developments taking place in real time, such as realtors discussing a specific property with a client.
If you are in business, construction or real estate, you would take a picture of the property that you were trying to sell, and share that information with (recipients) so they can get a real picture of what you are talking about, said Beverly Hodges, director of instant communication services at Sprint in Reston, Va.
While sending pictures between mobile phones has been possible for quite some time, Direct Send Picture is unique in the marketplace because it allows customers to look at and discuss an image at the same time, Tony Krueck, Sprint’s vice president of product development and management, said in a statement.
This kind of simple and efficient communication is of extreme value to our customers, especially those in the construction, insurance, real estate and public safety sectors.
Direct Send Picture is available immediately on the Motorola i870 phone, and will be included on all future Nextel phones, Hodges said. Software upgrades to enable Direct Send Picture will be available by the end of the year for several Nextel phone models, including the Motorola i850, i760, i560, i355 and i275.
The Direct Send Picture will be free until Feb. 28, 2006. Following the promotional period, users will have to pay a per-image fee of 25 cents for images sent and received. In addition, customers may be charged for Nextel Walkie-Talkie usage for the period of the call before and after the image is transmitted, depending on a customer’s rate plan.
While the Walkie-Talkie service currently runs only on the iDen network, officials said there are plans to bring push-to-talk and other Walkie-Talkie services to Sprint’s main wireless network. Walkie-Talkie services for Sprint’s next-generation wireless network are due in 2008, Hodges said.
The goal is to allow the same functions on the next-gen platform, Hodges said.