Expanding the Boundaries of the User Experience

Visual Voicemail is the First Comverse Product to Benefit from New Handset Client Development Capabilities

Comverse’s ability to quickly develop handset clients that can create compelling and innovative user experiences has been boosted by a recently introduced advanced tool: Sun’s LightWeight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT), a versatile and compact API for speedily creating attractive user interfaces for applications on mobile devices.

This development positions Comverse to improve the user interface of its services on a broad variety of devices, with immediate applicability to messaging and content services, such as visual voicemail.

Making Comverse Services More Attractive to Our Customers and Their Users

“This efficient mobile user interface toolkit can help to make Comverse services more attractive to our customers and their end users,” said Meir Keidar, AVP Marketing, Next-Generation Voicemail at Comverse. "By being able to take advantage of broader handset compatibilities, outstanding graphics and flexible layouts, Comverse will be better able to expand the limits of the user experience, enabling more people to enjoy services such as visual voicemail.”

“Another benefit is increased speed of development. Faster time-to-market for new clients gives us greater opportunity to take advantage of market opportunities,” added Keidar.

Advancing the Visual Voicemail Revolution

The first commercial application developed using LWUIT was a Comverse Visual Voicemail (VVM) Java client. The VVM client offers users advanced graphics and a preferred email-like view of their mailbox, with the ability to manage the application in a non-serial way. LWUIT made it possible to develop and release the rich UI client in a short time frame and allow it to run on multiple devices seamlessly.

"This new tool will help Comverse to continue to lead the Visual Voicemail revolution by building simple, easy to use solutions with a look and feel that appeals to all mobile users!" says Keidar. "An enhanced visual experience in even the most basic of devices can now be fully realized to create a fun experience for the user for daily use."

Easy to Do It with LWUIT

“Two of LWUIT's greatest features are its flexibility and ease of use. We were able to start developing with it almost immediately. It allows very fast implementation of both simple and highly intricate applications. In addition, we can extend LWUIT to add new features and capabilities, which will provide huge benefits in the future to developers and users,” says Keidar.

“Another excellent quality is its effect on workflow: the Resource Editor tool, which is a part of LWUIT, allows better management of graphical resources and improves the interface between Development and Graphics. This not only eases the development process in general, but also enables making changes to the User Interface quick and effortless. LWUIT is by far the best GUI tool we have worked with; it definitely upgrades our application by a few levels,” Keidar concluded.

Enhancing Visual Voicemail Enhances the Bottom Line

Comverse’s client-based Visual Voicemail enhances voicemail with a friendly, inviting visual interface and new email-like messaging capabilities, increasing the value and usability of this already popular service. Operators gain a differentiating service that provides new revenue sources, drives immediate data usage and revenues on their networks and accelerates migration to next-generation handsets.

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