It’s obvious enough that we use our mobile phones for more than just making voice calls, and now the people of India are about to take their portable entertainment to a new-ish level. Rajshri Productions plans on launching a 90-episode soap opera on mobile phones with the first episode getting released near the end of January 2008.

The concept of watching television on a cell phone isn’t exactly new — the Koreans and Japanese have been taking advantage of that functionality for some time — but the difference is that this is not being done over 1Seg. As far as I can tell, the episodes will be streamed and/or downloaded over the cellular network, feeding a need to satisfy short attention spans. Each episode is only three minutes long.

There are more than 220 million people in India who own cell phones and there’s a good chance that a large majority also enjoy watching soap operas. It sounds like a match-made in heaven — perhaps with a song, a dance, and someone hiding behind a tree — so we’ll see how successful Rajshri’s endeavor becomes.