The Hindu Business Line : Quick ways of losing money!

THE Canada-based Zi Corporation knows how to increase your mobile phone bills, however careful you are. This is no rocket science, but only a simple principle. Many users do not know all the services that their mobile company offers them.

Zi's Qix (pronounced "Quicks") indexes and lists everything — services, contacts and numbers — in the phone in a specific context.

How many times have you stopped dialling because you could not find the contact quickly? Well, it might never happen again.

Let's say you don't remember how you stored the contact — whether you used a nickname, first name, or initials — but you remember the sequence of digits in the phone number, say, 86.

When you type in 86, Qix will list all the numbers containing 86, contacts beginning with T-O, say Tony, and services beginning with T-O, say tones and download tones.

Qix doesn't stop there. It provides a context sensitive menu for all the items listed: You can call, message, or edit contacts; you can call/SMS/MMS a number; you can use a service.

All this means money: You make a call or send a message when you might have just abandoned the whole thing; you might even use a premium service depending on the context — you might have initially decided to send an SMS but can change your mind and send a picture message.

At present, Qix is on carrier trial with Virgin Mobile Holdings (UK).

Qix or a similar service may soon hit the airwaves around you here.

So, be warned: send flowers to your sweetheart, order pizza, pick a stock, send a picture, record sweet nothings, and after a month, rack your brains on where all the money went!

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