Comparison of mobile Second Life solutions

Here's a brief analysis of Second Life mobile solutions. If you know of any more such solutions, please let us know, and we'll add it to the table.

	Focus	Data usage	Phone market
Aqros	Social messenger	Low	Mass market phones
Comverse	Streaming	High	High-end phones
Vollee	Streaming	High	High-end phones
Sun.inc	Streaming	High	High-end phones
Vodafone	SMS & Voice – no in-game activities	None	Mass market phones
NEC	SMS & Voice – no in-game activities	None	Mass market phones

Aqros case study: call your virtual girlfriend now!

You met this lovely lady yesterday at Midnight reflections in Second Life.


It's now 10:00am, you're at work. You definitely want to talk to her now, but the suits blocked Second life on the firewall. Oh, the agony!

Enter Aqros for Second Life. Just whip out your mobile phone, launch Aqros, and IM with her until there's smoke all over the room. When your boss asks, you're just sending an SMS to one of the clients... :-)

Initial feedback on the Aqros beta

Ten days has passed since we launched our closed beta of Aqros, the mobile messenger for Second life.

This is what we have learned:

1. More than 50% of the people who registered in our website (http://get.aqros.com/) are using mobile phones that we are not yet supporting :-(

This means we have more work, and we aleady working on adding more devices, so hang in there.

2. The most popular mobile phone we support currently is (drumroll) the Nokia N95.

3. The most requested mobile phone is the Apple iPhone.

4. Users like the concept of a messenger style mobile client for Second life, and here are a few quotes:


"...Aqros doesn't need a 3G connection ...[which is] available to less than 15% of American cell users in their current phones. " Virtual World News

"AQROS gives us a step further into Mobile Verse" Nano Marketing Blog

"Streamed solutions… has some disadvantages as that you have to stream your data always through a third party or that the whole approach is somewhat slow. Here a text only approach might be better to circumvent this but then again typing on mobile devices is not fun" mrtopf.de Blog

“...this tops it all.. so cool..! it is GREAT! i love it...“
Miyamoto Ling comments on Dr Yesha’s blog


We will continue to report as we progress.

Aqros: Review of Features

Take look at some of our features:

Aqros features in a glance

Feedback Needed: Quick Say

As you see, we have a 'quick say' feature on that the chat tab.

What would you like to have there? Please let us know.

Aqros Privacy Policy

Your privacy is extremely important to us - we will not distribute or share your personal details with any third parties. Your avatar name, mobile number and any other personal data will only be used for allowing you to connect to Second Life on your mobile phone.

No ads, no spyware, no spam, no short vidoes of a monkey playing a ukulele (well, maybe the last one, but that's it...)

See our full EULA (End User License Agreement).

Aqros for Second Life: The long demo

Aqros For Second Life: The short demo

Aqros as a social messenger, not in 3D

Our long term vision is connecting between users of many worlds. We focus on friends, chat, IM, and other social features.
We didn't think rendering a full 3D virtual world is really useful. Why?

1. First of all, who wants to actually play Second Life on his tiny mobile screen? Aqros is meant for checking on your Second Life friends when you are away from your PC. I mean, we're impressed with companies doing 3D worlds on mobile, but we don't see the point of that, from the user side.
2. 3D rendering is only suitable for high-end devices, and we would like to accomodate all of you, even the ones with *cough* weaker devices.

As always, let us know what you think.

Feedback Needed: Why Short Names

As you can see, the current version shows the first name of your friend, along with the first letter of his last name. This has to do with how we configure the names for various phones and screen resolutions.

Please let us know what you think.

Beta Starts: July 1, 2008

After many hours of development (and lots of diet coke) we are happy to announce that.... Aqros 1.0 beta is out. We now have the client working on around 100 (one hundred) different mobile phones. We are contstantly working on adding more phones to the list.

What can you do...

1. Go to http://get.aqros.com
2. Select your mobile phone model.
3. Get the SMS that will allow you to download the client.
4. Run the client on your mobile (and connect to Second Life).

Have fun, and don't forget to send us your feedback (here and on our forum).

Feature: Teleport My Friends

Using Aqros you can invite your friends over... even if you are not on Second Life. Let's say you want someone to visit your house... just select their name and teleport them.

So What is Aqros

You are in your local Starbucks -- and you need to see who is on-line right now?
Or - you are in Second Life and you want to invite a friend to join you in second life-- but he (or she) us not on-line?

Aqros will allow you to do it and much more. You can chat with your neighbors, IM with your friends, and even Wake them up if they are not on-line.

Aqros (beta) is FREE to download and use. (Internet charges may apply with your providers).

You can see all the features here
You can read about our strict privacy policy.
Photo by 'ashengrove'