VietNamNet Bridge – Information technology experts say that they are witnessing a wave of localizing apps for mobile phones which aim to reach to more Vietnamese clients.

When announcing its presence on the Vietnamese market in July, the representative of RIM – the manufacturer of Black Berry – said that though being a global company, RIM strives to become a company that well understands local users and that it plans to bring Vietnamese highly localized utilities.

Dany Bold, Deputy President of RIM in Vietnam said that Vietnamese users have got used to Black Berry series, but it’s still difficult to exploit all the functions of the smart phones. It is because the apps on Balck Berry remain unfamiliar to domestic users.

One of the barriers is the difference in the culture and language of the applications. Therefore, RIM wishes to cooperate with local programmers in order to develop the apps for the mobile phones.

The wave of localizing apps

The story of RIM shows one of the challenges that foreign mobile phone manufacturers are facing. The manufacturers well understand that applications have big influences to the success or failure of a device on the market, and that it is necessary to make the apps more usable and friendly to local users,

Jonh Stefanac, President of Qualcomm in South East Asia and Thailand, said that smart phones sales now dominate the mobile phone industry, while the requirements of users have been increasing every day. They want to use smart phones for multi-purposes, from downloading music, film to making video calls, sending emails, playing online games and managing their business.

In order to satisfy the demand, every product needs to have good operation systems and applications.

In Vietnam, the application localization has attracted a lot of big guys, such as Nokia, Samsung, RIM and LG who have joined hands with local programmers to develop the apps specifically designed for domestic users.

Samsung, for example, has an app store for Bada operation system, RIM cooperates with TMA Mobile Solutions, and LG has LG Apps and Nokia has Ovi Store.

However, commenting about the app stores, experts say that most of the apps still cannot touch the users’ requirements deeply, while they just satisfy the demand for entertainment, or they simply provide the Vietnamese versions of the foreign apps.

Therefore, experts think that the smart phones now have too little the “local features”, while they mostly bear the characteristics of the manufacturers.

Tran Phuc Hong, Director of TMA Mobile, said that there are many apps, but they are not practical. Therefore, users still have to download the foreign software pieces and apps, even though they want to use the software and apps in Vietnamese. That also explains why smart phones now just can touch young people, who have good knowledge in technology and foreign language skills.

Seeking out new ways

A lot of technology firms have been trying to approach more effectively to clients by joining hands with some content service providers.

Most recently, Samsung has cooperated with VNG to integrate Zing software on Samsung Galaxy Y, which has been known with the name of ZingPhone.,

With the cooperation, clients can use the apps which have become familiar to Vietnamese Internet users, namely Zing Me, Zing MP3, Zing News, Zing Browser and two other games

Vuong Quang Khai, Deputy General Director of VNG, said that by doing that way, the Samsung’s smart phone would become more popular to Vietnamese users.

Experts comment that the cooperation between VNG and Samsung would bring benefits to both. The mobile phone manufacturer can save time and efforts to find suitable apps for local users, while it can approach to the VNG’s community of one users. Meanwhile, VNG can also attract more clients from mobile phone users.

Source: TBKTSG