InformationWeek

September 25, 2000

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It's A Wireless World

continued...page 2 of 3

More on wireless:

sidebar: Schwab Takes It Slow On Its Wireless Service

sidebar: Wireless Messaging Lets United Be Proactive

Tele.com: Standards (9/18/00)

TechWeb: Nortel Inks $100 Million Wireless Deal in Spain (9/7/00)

TechWeb Finance: Deutsche Telekom Flexes Global Muscle (8/28/00)

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IT executives at U.S companies know they have to address all of these technical, marketing, and cultural issues as they begin to roll out options such as wireless portals; messaging services for stocks, weather, or sports data; or even something more transactional, such as wireless online buying.

"We're doing what I consider to be the easier stuff right now--taking content from the Web and seeing what works best on wireless," says Bob Sofman, VP of global wireless solutions group for Charles Schwab & Co. The San Francisco financial-services firm introduced its Pocket Broker service in the United States in June and has been delivering stock information wirelessly in Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong since last October. "We're spending as much as we can trying to determine what's around the corner for wireless. But the state of the technology, the applications, and the culture around wireless in the United States is in its infancy."

Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have a different starting point than the United States, which begins to explain the differences in wireless use.

"In Europe it's a lifestyle issue--landline phone prices are so high in some places that wireless is cheaper or equivalent. And then you've got the freedom and mobility," notes Jane Zweig, executive VP at consulting firm Herschel Shosteck & Associates. "The United States has a PC-centric mentality and an expectation that the wireless Internet will be a replication of the enterprise desktop. But it doesn't make sense to replicate that on a phone."

Her point is a good one. A phone interface is inherently smaller, and, some say, harder to read; a plastic stylus and touchscreen may prove a lousy mouse alternative. The color, rich graphics, and information volume of non-WAP Web pages would also overwhelm the processing power of any wireless phone.

Bob Sofman Photo by Richard Morgenstein In addition, makers of wireless handsets and infrastructure don't have one standard in the United States. In Europe and throughout most of Asia, the Global System for Mobile communications standard predominates, and its ubiquity means cheaper prices and easier roaming away from home wireless systems, Zweig adds.

Critics also pan the current wireless access devices. The small screen doesn't handle graphics and sometimes permits as little as four lines of text. The screens are also monochromatic, battery life is short, and the cradles for Palms and the modems are often heavy and cumbersome.

"Wireless data phones are a fairly clunky experience. We've focused on the personal digital assistant to date since it's more form-friendly,'' says Keith Pelczarski, special agent for mobility at the Motley Fool in Alexandria, Va., an investment service that also operates in the United Kingdom and Germany. "I've heard loud and clear that the ease of use with the phones is bad to awful. So there's still a ways to go before it's a pleasant experience for folks."

He notes that some models are getting lighter and easier to use, a prerequisite for the wireless Web's success. "When the interface gets better, there will be more demand for them," Pelczarski says. After all, if wireless service is all about convenience, no one wants to carry around multiple pieces of hardware to make voice calls, access the Web, or check to see if the battery is working.

On the flip side, what's taking so long for handheld devices to get equipped for voice conversations? Some say that's not the way those plastic stylus users want to communicate. But voice, long a commodity where services are concerned, is headed for commoditization on the hardware front, according to MIT's Lippman. "Fifteen years ago, you might have predicted that everything you'd buy would have a clock, since the cost of integrating a clock into technology was gradually becoming zero," Lippman says. "Wireless devices will do the same--the cost of adding a microphone for voice will be zero. The best way to think of the future of cellular is not as a smaller, more powerful handset, but something that disappears into something else--a Palm device or something you wear on your key chain."