Adobe Success Story

T-Mobile International is one of the world’s leading companies in mobile communications, offering consumers and business customers advanced mobile communications services, including voice, messaging, and high-speed wireless data services. By October 1, 2004, almost 109 million people were using the mobile communications services provided by T-Mobile or its parent company, Deutsche Telekom.

Challenge

T-Mobile offers News Express to provide subscribers with a superior, unique mobile multimedia news and entertainment service. T-Mobile's goal was to make the new data service easy to use and to provide richer experiences by integrating text and images for a true multimedia experience. They also wanted to optimize network efficiencies, reduce data-delivery complexities and cost, and to support more users and content across diverse handsets.

Solution

With Flash Lite, T-Mobile was able to deliver a superior data service. "News Express is a compelling multimedia alternative to the various news sources that people already use," said Klaus Tebbe, executive vice president of consumer marketing, T-Mobile International. "By using Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1, we were able to build a richer, instantly accessible news service that provides an amazing customer experience."

News Express delivers twice-daily news reports to users’ phones. These preconfigured reports cover general news, sports, show business, lifestyle, and weather information. News Express offers a simple pricing model for users based on monthly subscriptions, like a print-based newspaper. Content of each news edition is temporarily cached on the device for an “always on” experience.

Benefits

Superior Subscriber Experience

• The T-Mobile News Express interface is easy-to-use, integrating text and images for a true multimedia experience.
• News Express delivers news reports to users’ phones, which can be browsed instantly and are always available. The “always-on” approach spares users from the traditional experience of having to wait and search for content.

Fast Time-to-Market

• Flash Lite provides consistent display of one application across diverse handset configurations.
• Using Flash, the T-Mobile team significantly reduced overall development cycle by 50%.

Mature Development Tool

• Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 provided T-Mobile developers a comprehensive feature set to produce rich mobile content.
• With Flash Lite developers can create prototypes in Flash and apply those prototypes directly to handsets.

Project Details

With News Express, T-Mobile has launched the first European implementation of an “always-on” news and infotainment service that is regularly updated without user interaction. It's also the first European service powered by Macromedia Flash Lite technology. Flash Lite provides a unique, dynamic user experience due to content being cached on the device for viewing anytime, anywhere. The service has already been launched in the UK, Germany, and Austria.

Like several other Flash-based consumer products and services, News Express from T-Mobile is winning critical acclaim. The first recognition was the “Innovation 2004” award from the UK Association of Online Publishers. Most recently, T-Mobile won the best “Customer-Facing Experience” award at the MAX 2004 exhibition in New Orleans.

The Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 authoring tool gives T-Mobile developers a comprehensive feature set to produce rich mobile content. T-Mobile had used traditional programming tools (C/C++/Java) to code their application for each platform, optimizing each prototype for unique combinations of screen size, OS, and browser configurations. With Flash Lite, developers can directly deploy prototypes onto handsets, shortening the overall development cycle by 50%. In addition, a consistent runtime across handsets means developers can create content once and deploy it across diverse handsets with varying phone operating systems and screen resolutions with ease. With its eye on the future, T-Mobile is working to offer News Express to a huge variety of mobile devices.

Using Flash Lite also avoids all the waiting and searching that is typical of current offerings. Initially T-Mobile had explored optimizing a WAP solution for the News Express data service but found (based on extensive usability studies) that the latency of mobile web browsing, inherent to WAP services, was unsatisfactory for its subscriber base.

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