London: The people who cannot afford advanced cell phones have a reason to smile, a new technology will enable internet based services to the most basic handsets. The network protocol being built by Umesh Chandra from Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, will get mobile phones connected to the web via SMS.

Chandra believes that the system will be beneficial in countries like India where most of the population cannot afford to buy a computer or advanced model handset to access the internet.

For a lot of people in India, the cellphone is the first communication device and slowly it might also become a computing device," he was quoted as saying in New Scientist.

The technology will upgrade mobile phones with a particular Facebook like application, which will allow people to text and locate friends in a specific area.

Shifting from the previous location based SMS systems, which could provide static information, such as the position of the nearest library, this new system can use location information based on the nearest cellphone base stations to send a response. It will also be able to send details of any nearby active vendors on sites like Craigslist.

The system can trace a person using it to within 300 metres in cities with a high density of cellphone base stations like Bangalore.

"What location means to us [in the west] is not exactly what location means in India. [in India], when you tell somebody where you live, you don't give them your complete address. You give them a point of interest," said Chandra.

He insisted that GPS enabled phones would offer better accuracy down to 10 meters. The character limit of SMSs normally acts as a limitation to the amount of information that can be exchanged. However, the new technology has tried solving it by developing a concise syntax to encapsulate the information the user wants.