World's first newspaper mobile

The world’s first newspaper mobile phone has been released in Sweden. In a new measure to make the news even more accessible, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) has released a deal in conjunction with the Nokia 6120 3G. Purchased through the DN website, the mobile phone offers unlimited free access to the DN website by simply pressing a special “DN” button on the phone. Readers must subscribe to a 20€ monthly plan to take advantage of this mobile phone offer.

Why not? With such a surge in the possibility of technology, options are open for creative new ways to be informed with breaking news and current affairs. While Sweden is considered to be technologically advanced, Swedish mobile phone users are far behind those in, for instance, Japan and South Korea in terms of using mobile phones to surf the internet. A general trend in Sweden sees mobile phone users as believing it to be costly and complicated to get online with their mobile. DN marketing head Johan Othelius believes DN is now demystifying the process and “removing that obstacle.”

In Japan, for instance, a recent study indicated that 53.6 million Japanese people use their mobile phones to access the internet, an astonishing figure that is almost equal to the nation’s number of PC-based internet users. However, the monthly average for internet time spent on mobiles was much lower than PC-based usage, at 8.1 hours rather than the 18.9 hours spent on the internet via PC. At 75%, checking email was by far the most popular activity conducted whilst mobile browsing, followed by news/information (52%), search/navigation (51%), games (39%) and blogs (38%).

Yet what does that mean for mobile phones UK? Could we soon be seeing The Guardian’s Nokia 6300? Or The Sun’s Motorola W220 Pink? Stay tuned, I say…