Press Releases

Budapest, March 18, 2011

On March 18 the T-Mobile university Smartphone and secondary school Smartphone Junior competitions will be closed by the award ceremony and the opening of an exhibition. Almost all the bids entered explored the borderlines of building community nets, focusing on merging the currently known online community services with GPS applications, as well as simplifying the school and university education related activities. As a new tendency – seen especially among university students, but also secondary school pupils – the market introduction and revenue generating potentials of the ideas were also analysed.

The main objective of this year’s competition was to inspire executable ideas and solutions developed for creative applications on interfaces and platforms of smartphones, making everyday life easier in unique and novel ways.

Student processed the announced topic in different ways, although they mainly concentrated on developing community activities related to their direct, location based solutions applied in the school or university environment, as well as on creating virtual community spaces in which smartphones make the exchange of information and keeping in touch more simple and faster, either in the field of networking, exchanging notes or time schedules or a driver’s test. Location based-social-networking is hardly known a term yet, however students already generally apply and build their ideas on it.

Three Hungarian universities and secondary schools, as well as T-Mobile jointly launched the competition titled „Widely useable solutions on creative multimedia applications on smartphones” in school year 2010/2011. Prizes were awarded in the exhibition hall of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

In the frame of the cooperation started three years ago the Hungarian Fine Arts University, Budapest Corvinus University, Budapest Technical and Economic University and Leövey Klára Secondary School, Fazekas Mihály Secondary School and the Fine and Applied Arts Vocational Training School entered into a partnership and issued a competition invitation for grade 7-13 students, focused around the smartphones, which are undisputedly popular among students. The competition was open to both individuals and teams, winners were awarded valuable prizes.

Competition entries received from universities were judged by a highly reputed professional jury, composed of experts from all three universities. Entries were assessed by Dr. Nemeslaki András, head of the E-business Research Center of Corvinus University, Dr. Charaf Hassan assistant professor of the Budapest Technical and Economic University and professor Kőnig Frigyes from the Hungarian Fine Arts University. T-Mobile was represented in the jury by chief marketing officer Király István. The Smartphone Junior competition entries were assessed within the schools, while the performance of teams was assessed by the secondary schools together. Secondary school Fazekas was represented by deputy director Szokolai Tibor, Leövey was represented by director Bánhegyesi Zoltán and the Fine and Applied Arts Vocational Training School was represented by deputy art director Bakos Ildikó.

„We are convinced that smartphones offer huge potentials and sales figures justify this. In 2010 we doubled the sales ratio of smartphones compared to the previous year – in the early part of the year every 10th sold phone was a smartphone, while at year end already every third phone belonged to this category. Online lifestyle is gaining ground and becomes natural among young people, due to mobile terminals becoming ever more versatile and mobile broadband Internet becoming widely available” – said Király István, chief marketing officer of T-Mobile, responsible for the brand.

In the university category altogether 6 million HUF and one year free of charge, domestic mobile Internet usage was awarded to the winners, while the best secondary school competition entries were awarded by T-Mobile with smartphones (Samsung Galaxy S, Nokia 5230 and T-Mobile Pulse Mini in Domino package).

Competition entries can be viewed between March 18-25 at the exhibition organised in the Hungarian Fine Arts University.