The French company Mobease has launched Mobifindit a downloadble application that makes finding contacts and sending SMS faster.  Using its white label search application Mobifindit reduces the number of clicks it takes to send a message and find a contact.  It can take up to 15 clicks to send an SMS on some devices and Mobifindit has reduced this to 3-5 clicks.

It sounds great and its for all Symbian Series 60 devices - but is it any good? 

Well.  The live demo on the website clearly highlights the ease of the application once its downloaded.  But actually - the downloading part - is where the headache begins.  It can only be downloaded by going to a specific URL on WAP.  (All instructions are at the bottom of this blog).  Then it doesn't just get downloaded to your device or sent via SMS - it goes into an applciation manager that then syncs with the Nokia PC Suite.  

This is not the bad bit. In fact, up until this point - so far so good. Its very similar to downloading Noka's own mobile search engine that already sits proudly on my 6680 device.  But then - the bad news.

The instructions said "use Bluetooth to download and send or something or another .... "...from there I lost it.  The process was already lengthy - it look at least 3 mintues for my browser to even find the dl.mobease.com URL and I was concerned about costs and the boredom factor was setting in.  Not to forget - I would have to leave then switch out to turn bluetooth on..

For a company that was focused on reducing the number of clicks to search for contacts and send an SMS... one would expect the downloading process to be just as simple. 

The key ingredient to new applications and success in the D2C space is keeping the download simple. The same issues that have lead Mobease to create the findit appliation need to be implied to the download instructions. 
Keep it simple

The Mobifindit instructions

a. Save "mobifindit.sis" to your computer by clicking the download link below

Using Nokia PC Suite on windows

• b. Connect your phone to the pc (Bluetooth, Cable or infrared)
• c. Double-click "mobifindit.sis" file and follow the installation process

Using bluetooth

• b. Send the file to the handset using:
  • - Windows: Right-click, Select the bluetooth menu and then your phone (or discover) in the list
  • - Mac OS X: Click on the bluetooth icon at the top right hand side of your screen and select "Send a file" to send the file to the phone
• c. Go to the phone's inbox and click / open the received file, then follow the instructions.