| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 15, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| TECH BUYING GUIDE -- PHONES
To See What's in the Pipeline, Look Abroad Rehito Hatoyama and a colleague from the Mitsubishi Corp. trading house have just finished a client meeting in Tokyo's Gotanda district. It's 7 p.m., and everyone wants to unwind over a good meal somewhere new. Is there a great restaurant nearby? Hatoyama, 25, whips out one of his two Internet-capable digital cell phones, clicks on the menu, and several seconds later accesses a ''gourmet guide.'' Cradling the palm-size handset in his left hand, he types in with his thumb the phonetic equivalent of ''Gotanda'' and is soon scrolling down a list of recommended eateries in the area. He spots one that looks promising and clicks on it to initiate a phone connection. While waiting for the restaurant to answer, he glances at his other cell phone and sees that he has e-mail and voice-mail messages. ''It's just so convenient,'' raves Hatoyama. ''I can get information instantly.'' Think every country is lagging behind the U.S. when it comes to Internet mania? Think again. While Japan and Europe are still behind in the PC revolution and overall Internet adoption, they're well ahead of the U.S. on the road to the mobile Internet. ''When we want our people to learn about what's interesting in mobile phones, we send them to Japan or Scandinavia,'' says Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft Corp. European phone companies are rolling out a host of data services for Web-surfing smart phones. The biggest bottleneck, in fact, is a shortage of the phones. ''People are lining up for the Nokia 7110s,'' says Jacob Hamacher, chief executive of EHand, a Swedish software startup. ''It's a fever.'' CONFERENCE CALL. In Japan, the fever is becoming an epidemic. More than 3 million Japanese, mostly teenagers and young adults pining for easy Net access, have signed up with the main wireless carriers. NTT DoCoMo's I-mode service is the most popular, attracting 2 million subscribers since the start of services in February. Users get an instant connection and are charged only for the volume of data transmitted and received. The rival CDMAOne service, launched in April, now has close to 1 million Net users. CDMAOne requires a dial-up link and often a long wait for a connection. Europeans are a couple of steps behind. The state of the art, at least for now, is the Nokia 9110, the so-called Communicator. This is a large, $750 cell phone that flips open into a tiny, Web-browsing computer. It links with a PC resembling a palm-size handheld to coordinate its calendar and contact list. It has a speakerphone, allowing you to punch up a name, hit the call button, and yammer hands free. The problem with the Communicator: It's bulky, and the Web-browsing is limited to a handful of specially formatted sites. No matter, the Communicator is fast becoming obsolete. Following Japan's lead, Europe is turning to the rival Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard for data. Hitting the shelves about now is Nokia's entry, the $500 7110 model that looks more like a conventional phone handset. Other European companies are showing off their own variations on the theme. Ericsson's R380, for example, resembles a small version of Nokia's Communicator, with a keyboard that folds back to expose a larger screen. But it's not available on the European market until January. The same goes for Alcatel's snazzy One Touch Com. Don't snap them up yet, though. The WAP standard is new enough to Europe that early products are likely to be buggy and perhaps incompatible with each other. So a lot of companies are holding back, letting Nokia work out the kinks with its 7110 handset. ''I'll let my competitors find the bugs,'' says one Alcatel manager. This could lead to huge demand for the new 7110, especially in Scandinavia, where people can check bank balances or subscribe to stock-market alerts triggered by the movement of individual share prices. On the rest of the Continent, services are still slow to rev up. During the Telecom99 trade show in Geneva, Switzerland, officials from the British phone company Orange showed off their Internet services on a Lake Geneva cruise. But the only weather forecasts were for the British Isles. The Japanese face no such troubles. Japan's Netizens can buy and sell stock, reserve hotel rooms and airplane seats, and check their horoscopes while on the go. Hatoyama is constantly reading news headlines on his CDMAOne set and checking soccer game results and the music hit charts on his I-mode. He sends and receives dozens of messages on both cell phones. Many of the services are free. Others charge a small monthly fee, such as the $2.85 he pays to keep his address book online. So what does it cost this power user? He figures he pays $140 a month for each phone, well above the average $85 most Net-phone users dish out. In Japan, a big fad is text chat--sending short e-mail messages to one another. People can be seen touch-typing messages on their tiny cell phones while walking on the streets. Hatoyama got the hang of it when he was a high-school student in Tokyo in the early 1990s. Back then, when cell phones weighed a ton and could only be rented, he and his friends used pagers to send each other messages in numerals. The first letter of the Japanese phonetic alphabet was coded 11, the second 12, and so forth. ''By comparison, a smart phone is a breeze to use,'' he says. WEE KEYPAD. Mind you, not everyone agrees. Eifumi Yasukawa, 31, who works for a family-run business in Toyama, in central Japan, says when it comes to Net access, he'll choose his Macintosh computer over his Net phone any day. And then there's the keyboard. ''If you're a teenager, fine. But I have a hard time typing on a tiny cell phone,'' says Yasukawa, who purchased an I-mode handset in September. Still, he loves the convenience, and so he's practicing. He also has his Mac set up to transfer his urgent e-mail messages to his wireless phone when he's on the move. That way, he says, ''I'm always in touch.'' Thanks to the new generation of smart phones, Japanese consumers are finally joining the Net revolution. And they're just the first wave. Wait until NTT DoCoMo, the country's largest wireless operator with 27.7 million subscribers, launches its Third Generation service by March, 2001. This technology will make possible lightning-speed data and video transmissions, spawning a slew of new gadgets. By then, Hatoyama could be running a wireless content service, like some of his friends. ''The opportunities will be boundless,'' he says. In Japan and Europe, that is. For now, at least, the U.S. has yet to pop up on the mobile Internet radar screen. By Irene M. Kunii in Tokyo and Stephen Baker in Paris _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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