KEY POINTS:
The picture is grainy and stilted, but with a little imagination you get the idea of what's going on.
No, I'm not talking about the over-hyped experience of video-calling on a mobile phone - although I could be.
I'm referring to the rather specialist pastime of mobile network market-share watching - a dry hobby for anyone other than a telecommunications analyst.
Every quarter, new mobile connection figures come out. Vodafone issued its last week, a couple of weeks after the only other player in this game, Telecom, threw its into the ring.
Telecom has been on top in this contest lately, posting gains on Vodafone for seven of the past eight quarters. But Vodafone remains ahead with 54.5 per cent of the market.
Apart from counting customers, another area where the two companies are competing vigorously is in the race to introduce new and faster technology.
The "mobile data" battle is on, and the operators are clambering to sell us the convenience of connecting to the internet from anywhere at broadband speeds.
Vodafone has a new 3G technology called HSDPA, which has a theoretical top speed of 3.6 megabits a second.
It is available so far only in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, but is coming to other centres next year.
Telecom wins the prize for the more long-winded 3G initialism - CDMA EVDO Rev A - which defines a technology giving similar speeds and which is promised for Auckland before Christmas and other parts of the country next year.
Network operators are pushing data services as part of their quest to raise ARPU, the industry's most important initialism - average revenue per user.
Selling broadband use on top of voice-calling airtime is the logical way to increase revenue in a market where it is hard to add new connections because most people already have cellphones.
The Japanese market is a shining example of what can be achieved in the quest for higher ARPU.
The Japanese send and receive emails, rather than texts, on their mobiles, and 86 per cent connect to the internet from their phones.
As a result, ARPU in Japan is the highest in the world at US$56 ($83) a month compared with the $47 a month reported by Vodafone New Zealand last week.
Phone users on Japan's 3G HSDPA networks email, video-call, and download an average 100 megabytes of data a month.
The Japanese handset is accepted as a virtual wallet. Its scanning technology enables it to be widely used for transactions such as buying train passes.
In Tokyo last week I met Rory Buckley, a mobile industry veteran who has worked for equipment supplier Ericsson for 32 years.
Buckley's Irish accent seemed out of place as he discussed his role overseeing the world-leading Japanese and Korean markets, and the lessons Ericsson was taking from those markets to other less developed ones.
He believes music downloads will continue to be a good source of income for mobile operators, and that other data-intensive services, such as personalised mobile TV, will be the way forward.
As the mobile phone increasingly becomes an essential storage device for music, photos and personal information, Buckley says network operators are still grappling with how to charge users appropriately to encourage use of data services and the growth of ARPU.
He believes permanent storage of personal data could be a service operators will provide.
"Maybe it will be that the network will store your music for you once you download it and pay for it, then every time you grab it you may have to pay a bit pipe [data transfer] fee," he said.
Network vendors such as Ericsson are reshaping their businesses to cater for growth in data services and content provision.
In New Zealand another small step towards further encouraging mobile data use was taken last week when Vodafone dropped the price of music track downloads from $3.50 to $1.99. Telecom will probably follow suit.
But we still have a way to go before the mobile data experience reaches a level that is truly attractive to users.
The gradual way 3G technology is being introduced in New Zealand may be the only economic and logistical option, but it means that for the majority of users, data speeds remain slow and video calling is still clunky.
* Simon Hendery travelled to Japan as a guest of Ericsson.
