A broad range of applications for the Wireless Internet will warrant
a variety, of access devices. The incumbent handset manufacturers—
Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia—have the benefit of
years of experience in building consumer terminals, integrated
voice service, and have expertise in next-generation wireless air
interface standards. Many of today’s products already offer
WAP microbrowsers and SMS. Competition will be intense
among the many manufacturers vying for market share, and this
will ultimately benefit consumers through lower prices.
One of the major challenges for the handset vendors is to
design phones with simplified text entry and Web navigation.
Typing out text messages on cellular handsets is cumbersome,
as is navigating through the menus of many phones. Features
such as Tegic’s T9 predictive text input are useful but require
some practice to become familiar enough to be useful.
A new range of products is emerging that will compete with
the traditional handset for a share of the Wireless Internet terminal
market. Palm and Handspring are adding wireless functionality
to PDAs, as are new Pocket PC handhelds from Sony,
Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq. The competition among these
devices will be intense as manufacturers jockey for position in
this rapidly growing device market segment. All of these devices
will help build the momentum of the enterprise market as they
become tools for corporate users to access company data and
read and respond to emails.
One challenge to creating wireless applications has been the
ability to write programs that could be loaded and run on
devices with proprietary operating systems. Devices such as cellular
phones have traditionally used an operating system that
did not allow for new programs to be added, and most manufacturers
do not release details that would allow developers to
integrate a new application into an existing device’s software.
PDAs have been easier to develop applications for, because
platforms such as Palm and WinCE were created with software
developers in mind. The drawback to PDA software has been
the lack of wireless connectivity.
As cellular phones and PDAs absorb each other’s features
and abilities it’s becoming harder to tell the difference between
a PDA and a phone. PDAs that are capable of connecting to the
Internet and making voice calls now compete with cell phones
that are able to run and display applications. One thing that
these two types of devices share is common software platforms
that enable users to add and use wireless applications.
Some device manufacturers are also designing handhelds that
integrate other devices such as digital camera, music player, and
others that result in some interesting combinations. These new
all-in-one, “Swiss Army Knife”-style mobile devices may not necessarily
meet the needs of the power user, but will eliminate the
need to carry multiple gadgets. For instance, Samsung and Sprint
PCS offer an MP3 phone and in Japan, camera phones have been
available for the past couple of years. Leading device designers
such as the United Kingdom firm of Seymour Powell are planning
future devices that may no longer look like today’s cellular
phones, but take into account people’s usage habits, resulting in
products that make viewing, listening, entering information, and
interaction with the device much simpler and intuitive. While
some of these new hybrid devices may be compelling, we do not
believe that they will ever completely replace the basic wireless
phone. Additionally, any large scale phone replacement cannot
occur until the proper wireless network architecture is in place,
which we believe will not occur until 2004.
As device manufacturers offer more functionality in their products:
color screens, always on access, camera, music players, faster
processors, more memory—these all will consume more power.
Vendors will need to develop power minimization strategies in
addition to new features. The current line of products include:
• Basic wireless phone. The primary functions of basic wireless
phones include voice calls, Caller ID, voice mail, short
messaging, basic address lists, and Web browsing. The units
have small displays.
• Smartphones. These devices are basically wireless phones
with PDA-like features embedded in them. They have a separate
alpha keyboard, calendar, address book, personal information
management (PIM), and color screen. An example is
the Nokia 9210 Communicator (Figure 4-2).
• Two-way pagers. The primary benefits of two-way paging
are the reliable national coverage, strong in-building reception,
and long battery life compared to cellular phones. The
major drawback of the messaging-only pagers is that their
Web browsing capabilities are much less advanced than those
of smartphones, pocket PCs, and PDAs. Examples include
the RIM Blackberry and Motorola.
• PDAs/pocket PCs (with embedded or external modems).
Personal organizers, many of which now come with a color
screen and have the ability to use Windows applications such
as Excel and Word. These include Palm, Compaq iPAQ,
Casio, Handspring, and Hewlett Packard.
(See Chapter 2 for more detailed information on operating
systems like Palm, Symbian/Epoc, WinCE, and J2ME—a version
of Java.) 138