Mid-Range Mobile Phones

Channel

• Data Transfer through GPRS
• Mobile Application for different operation software
• Mobile Web
• Additional features such as camera or bluetooth

Examples

The EPROM initiative in Kenya aims to foster mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship. EPROM has also experimented with different mobile application solutions such as:

• Airtime Banking
• Mobile Mapping Kenya
• MoSoko - The Mobile Community Market

These applications are programmed for mobile phones with different softwares and varying operation systems.

MXit (pronounced "mix it") is a free instant messaging software application developed in South Africa that runs on GPRS/3G mobile phones and on PCs. It allows the user to send and receive one-on-one text and multimedia messages to and from other users, as well as in general chat rooms. (Wikipedia)
Dr. Lary Garsden gives some impression how it is used: "Most school-children in South Africa use a system called “MXit” MXit is a basic Internet chat application for the mobile phone, and five million people use it; because in South Africa, the cost of sending a single character via MXit is one ten-thousandth of the cost of sending a single character via SMS. For two rand a day, less than 20p, these kids can stay all day on MXit, despite the fact that it has a terrible user interface that the likes of us wouldn’t put up with. Many of the schools have banned use of MXit. But Gary and his colleagues discovered that the kids use MXit to do their homework collaboratively. Therefore, they added functionality to the MXit system, having reverse-engineered the protocol, and added these features and functions into some of the chatrooms. The kids loved it. Remember, they have no Internet access. They added an equation-solver, for solving quadratic and linear equations, and an interface to Wikipedia."