Twitter’s New Focus on Dumbphones Is Really Smart

Photo: Racklever/Wikicommons

Twitter has always been a mobile-first company. It started life in 2006 as an SMS service designed for dumbphones, and was just as great on a Razr as it was a BlackBerry. But today’s social media giant blew up only after smartphones gave users a more robust experience. Now, to expand its reach even further, Twitter is doubling down on legacy hardware, bringing a bit of smartphone richness to people who don’t actually have smartphones.

Over the past 24 hours, Twitter announced a pair of deals, one with Nokia and another with MediaTek to bring app-level support to feature phones — phones that aren’t quite smartphones, but do more than just make calls and send text messages. Feature phones typically have a camera, simple Web browsers, e-mail support, and a handful of simple apps.

The Nokia deal will make a Twitter app available to all Series 40 feature phones via Nokia’s app store. Perhaps more notable, however, is that Taiwan-based chipmaker MediaTek will be pre-loading a Twitter app in its middleware. This means the app will essentially come pre-installed on all MediaTek chipsets, so all a handset maker or brand needs to do is switch on the software, and add branding if it wants. It’s a big deal, as MediaTek has a huge presence in Asia, and is a player in other emerging markets where Twitter is still seeing rapid growth.

While iOS and Android dominate smartphones, more people actually use feature phones, both in the United States and especially internationally, where feature phones make up some 70 percent of the market. The Nokia series 40 alone — just one part of Twitter’s announcement — has sold some 1.5 billion devices.

Twitter’s main growth area right now is in the international market. These latest deals help ensure that global feature phone users will have similar tweeting experiences to what other users experience on smartphones and the mobile web. It’s an especially big deal for capturing new users, as app-level control means that Twitter can hand-hold people through the sign-up process, helping them select usernames and passwords, and find others to follow.

Today’s deals also represent a Back to the Future moment for the service that was built for SMS (the 140 character limit is a direct result of that, a remnant of the SMS 160 character limit with some space left over for addressing). These short-form, text-focused roots have meant that Twitter has always been an information-dense experience — exactly the kind of thing that plays well to feature phone users, who typically won’t have unlimited data plans or large screens designed for slurping bits by the bucketfulls.

Twitter says it’s going to keep on targeting feature phones, which means you can expect to see a lot more birds flying across smaller screens.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/gadgetlab_0712_twitterphones/

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