Spice Digital*, Spice Group's MVAS (Mobile Value Added Services) companies, has launched a new mobile portal, Spice Gang, an off-deck mobile portal, that allows users to access various infotainment, and entertainment services such as Jokes, Greeting cards, News, Songs Cricket scores, among others. The portal also offers premium content from Coke Studio, Hungama, and other premium brands thus showcasing authenticated content. According to the company, the portal will allow subscribers to pull content, instead of content being pushed to their phones through subscription based services. (Nikhil adds: It's rather late in the day for Spice to launch an off-deck portal (outside the operator walled garden); companies like Indiatimes, Indiagames, Mauj, Hungama and Buongiorno, among others have had theirs for quite a while, but we see this also as a sign of things to come: more and more on deck players launching destinations, but with integrated telecom operator billing) Design The WAP portal essentially offers a simplistic icon based interface for browsing through content, and is designed majorly for feature phones. Using it on an iPhone, the site appeared to have far too much blank space, and did not seem to be touch-screen friendly, as the icons are small. The Coke Studio section offers Coke Studio videos and audio in mobile friendly .3gp and .mp3 file format, and can be downloaded free of charge. It seems like most of the content on the site is free of charge, since there is no specific mention of content costs anywhere. The Premium section…
