The new trend in the high-tech communication services has a name "content production for mobile devices". Now the technology is coming to the Polish market as more and more advanced phones are offered to customers.

Among the content downloadable to mobile phones you can find the variety of business and entertainment services like news, sports results, short video clips, information about weather, news, games and location based services (LBS). The latter enables to specify your own location when lost in the middle of the desert, forest or a strange city as well as provides you information about any points in the neighborhood you may wish to visit, like pubs, restaurants, clubs or cinemas. One of the most popular features are the games, which are said to be downloaded monthly by 3 million mobile phone subscribers in Europe. The biggest markets for downloadable games are Germany and the United Kingdom with market penetration of around 25 percent of the total number of mobile subscribers. But not only European customers are interested in games. The universal, "Who wants to be a millionaire," is very popular download in Japan, Australia, South Africa and Latin America.

As Jussi Immonen, key account manager at Mr. Goodliving, a Finnish provider of Java games that supplies over 50 mobile operators worldwide says, the most popular and the best selling are mobile games. "This solution is an example of extraordinary multiplayer game for a number of players. It is most useful in places like pubs where you are sitting and chatting with your friends and passing the phone to subsequent players." Mr. Goodliving has agreements with communication operators in 30 countries all over the world, among them such giants like Vodafone, o2 (belonging to the British Telecom Mobile Operator), T-mobile (Deutsche Telecom), Telefonica and Orange.

Downloadable games is something extra you can have apart from the pre-installed programs or another applications. As Immonen says, "Since we are observing bigger and bigger interest in new entertainment content on a global scale, we see a big market potential for them in Poland as well. We estimate this market for up to 100,000 downloads monthly". The only problem, according to Hans-Joachim Meihoefer of CodeToys, whose phone version of the quiz game Trivial Pursuit is currently taking European cell phones by storm, is that "the games need to be customized for each and every phone, depending on the screen size and other factors." He stresses that in Poland they will become popular as more advanced types of phones with different size screens, polyphonic sound, various operating systems and graphics will become available on the market.

Agnieszka Domańska