November 24th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
Since a few months, I own a MDA Vario IV from T-Mobile NL. It's also known as the wildly popular HTC Touch Pro. Great right? Not if you like mobile games and expect your operator to service you…
It's amazing. Here in The Netherlands, T-Mobile stunts with high end mobile phones like the HTC Touch Pro and (of course) the iPhone. Though iPhone consumers are serviced by Apple, owners of the HTC Touch Pro seem totally lost.
When entering the T-Mobile portal, there is a tab for mobile games, there are dozens of links about them and even banners are presented all over. Yet when I click any of them, I get error pages telling me I don't have a compatible device. Such a shame as I know from experience that Windows Mobile offers a great gaming experience.
As I expect that consumers will not limit themselves to the operator's Games tab, I also tried the partner portals without success. After 4 hours I am still without a cool mobile game.
As a final resort, I tried to go to same other portals which are popular in my country and even Microsoft's own portal. Yet, I still ran in problems. Not because my device was not supported, but because T-Mobile forces me to use Opera and many portals don't recognize it's headers as a mobile browsers.
Of course I know that there is something called Handango where I can purchase mobile games for my Windows Mobile device, but that's because I know. The average Joe the Plumber doesn't! This means that operators still have a long way to go, even those that have been putting Windows Mobile devices in the market for ages!
So to end this message of frustration, I can say only one thing. If there is anybody from T-Mobile out there who read this (and I know there are), please, please, please let me trade my MDA Vario IV for an iPhone as I hate the idea of being stuck to this thing for the next two years!
