Grey Cell Aims Soft Sell at Phone Dealers

Grey Cell Systems will begin targeting the mobile phone reseller channel as it unveils its latest GSM data product.

Grey Cell MD Keith Marsden said he was aiming to break ground in the independent phone retail market.

The product, Soft Mobile, is a piece of software which replaces the need for a GSM data card to link a GSM phone to either a notebook PC or CE-compatible palmtop.

Grey Cell will be releasing Soft Mobile on to the market on 1 September, for both Nokia and Ericsson handsets.

Marsden said Soft Mobile will not compete with the standard fax/data card market but will mean that phone users can upgrade without the need to buy a GSM card as well as a standard fax/data card.

?It?s rare that you find a new product that hits the market and immediately starts to kill off the competition. Soft Mobile will sit alongside standard card solutions,? he said.

?We?ll be pushing it to the mobile phone retailers as something that, because of its ease of use, will be attractive to existing mobile phone users,? added Marsden.

He refused to give details of pricing for Soft Mobile, but confirmed that it would sell at about one third less than the price of a typical GSM data card, giving it an estimated street price of less than #180.

Nokia has also developed a software-only GSM system, called Cellular Data Suite. Unlike the Grey Cell equivalent, Cellular Data Suite is only compatible with certain Nokia handsets.