| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 13, 2000 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| TECH BUYING GUIDE
Web Phones: A Long Way to Go They're hassle-ridden--but getting better fast  On the road to Phoenix with his younger brother, James, Paul Webster, a 28-year-old security company supervisor in Denver, fired up his Ericsson R280XL Web phone to check www.travel.com, a site for weather and traffic conditions. He quickly discovered that an on-ramp they intended to take was closed. Moments later he also found step-by-step directions for an alternate route. When he relayed this to James, who was driving, his brother was astonished. ''He was like: 'How'd you know?''' says Paul. ''I said: 'My phone told me.'''Web phones, those new gizmos that add a minibrowser and e-mail to a wireless handset, are proving handy for a wide variety of simple tasks. People are using them to remember appointments, make stock trades, find a restaurant, get news flashes, check airline schedules or horoscopes, or dash off short e-messages. Service fees can run from $50 to $90 a month for voice and data combined. But the phones themselves aren't much more costly than plain wireless units. They can be had for as little as $80, going up to $400 for the coolest looks. The phones are certainly showing up in increasing numbers of pockets and pocketbooks. Jupiter Communications, a New York research and consulting firm, estimates that 6.1 million Web phones are now in use in the U.S., up from 1.1 million last year, and that number is pegged to reach nearly 80 million by the end of 2003. The growth, however, doesn't accurately reflect the phones' popularity--or unpopularity--with users. The reason: Some wireless companies, such as Sprint, won't sell you anything other than a Web phone now--whether you want one or not--when you sign up for their services. A more telling statistic: 65% of wireless phone users say they have no interest in using their phone for e-mail or Net surfing, according to a study by Forrester Research. MATCHBOOK-SIZE. I sometimes feel like I'm one of them. While I use some of the online features, I often find them poorly explained and maddeningly difficult to figure out. Typing messages or Web commands with my thumbs on a phone's keypad is still cumbersome, despite recent improvements. Although some of the newest models have slightly larger screens, most still have those matchbook-size displays that are too tiny for more than two or three lines of text. Long messages download in segments, requiring you to stop in the middle of an e-mail and wait for the next chunk to arrive. It can seem to take forever.
Last month, Sprint added a menu of common questions and responses that promises to save you even more typing. Just highlight ''Call Me ASAP,'' click, and the message is sent. The service also allows you to create 35 short customized phrases--such as ''Miss you, Sweetie''--to add to the menu. Eventually, voice-recognition technology may make fiddling with the keypad moot. Again, Sprint ( FON) has taken the lead with what it calls Voice Command. For $10 monthly, you can upload your personal phone list--up to 500 names and 2,500 numbers--to a Web site, and then ''dial'' those numbers by simply saying the name of the person you're calling. Both AT&T ( T) and Sprint recently added instant messaging, a real-time text chat feature that America Online ( AOL) has offered computer users for years. This lets customers send short messages to friends who use the same service provider, so you can converse, in writing, almost as easily as you can talk back and forth on the phone. Sprint's service includes AOL's Buddy List so that a glance at your phone tells you which friends are on their phones and ready to receive instant messages. LOTS OF FUN. Another enormous headache for me was all the keypad typing required to arrange for such Web services as news or stock quotes. Now Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and AT&T let me lay all that groundwork from a desktop computer with a real keyboard. That makes the setup less of a pain. Choosing what you will receive can be a lot of fun. Sports fans, for instance, don't have to clutter their little screens with entertainment news or market results. You can schedule specific information to be sent to your phone at defined intervals--your horoscope daily, or perhaps the Dow Jones industrial average hourly. And you can set up alerts to beep you when specific events occur, such as a company issuing a news release, or a stock hitting a particular price. Not all the bugs are worked out yet. You must configure AT&T pages at the Web sites of its partners. If you want to be notified when a stock passes a target price on the way up or down, for example, you'll have to go to, say, eTrade and tell it to page you on the phone. Sprint's alerts, which draw content from a ''My Yahoo!'' page, require real digging: I had to plow through 14 screens to complete one setup--though Sprint blames that on a computer glitch and insists the process can be done in a few steps. If you can deal with the tiny screen, sit back and start viewing. Plenty of sites, including America Online, mySimon, Amazon.com ( AMZN), and even eBay ( EBAY), have devised a phone version of their services by stripping out memory-gobbling graphics and shortening text into byte-size pieces. Without graphics, though, I'd use a site such as eBay only to keep tabs on auctions. I wouldn't buy a Tiffany lamp without at least seeing a photo. Some features, such as restaurant listings, still need a lot of improvement. The worst problem is the inadequacy of the third-party databases. Verizon, for instance, uses a restaurant guide from InfoUSA, a list that includes eateries that have been closed for two years. AT&T's restaurant search is powered by the more up-to-date Zagat's, whose shuttered places have been out of business for only about a year. Also, the guides sometimes omit the logical establishments. In my search for an Italian restaurant near my home, Sprint found only a single chain pasta joint--and overlooked two dozen authentic places in Baltimore's Little Italy. When it comes to choosing hardware--the actual handsets--first try this simple test: Can you turn it on without resorting to the instructions? Any phone that requires a 200-page manual is too difficult to use. In fact, the easiest phones tend to be those with the fewest buttons. My favorite is the Sprint Touchpoint TP2200 ($229.99), which has 16 buttons. I could figure out even advanced features, like voice commands, without opening the how-to book. I also liked AT&T's $99 Ericsson R280LX, a basic workhorse. It has the usual small screen, but uses larger letters than usual for easy reading. And its icon-driven menu is easy to see and fairly simple to figure out. Nextel's top-line phone is the Motorola i1000 plus, a $199.99 flip-open number with a Buck Rogers look that's designed for durability. Its ''private call'' feature works like a walkie-talkie to connect users within a coverage area, which is sometimes as large as several states. Those calls don't count against paid minutes. So this model is useful for regional operations, such as construction companies that need to stay in constant contact with their crews. For people who want wow impact, a good choice is Verizon's Motorola Timeport P8767, a $299.99 StarTAC-style phone with a color screen that's brighter and easier to read than the usual monochrome screens. At the top of the ladder is the $399 Sprint TP3000, which comes with a touch-screen organizer, similar to a Palm or a Handspring. When the cover flips open, it activates a speakerphone so you can use your PDA (personal digital assistant), perhaps checking the calendar, while chatting. Its comparatively large screen--2 1/2 by 1 1/2 inches--makes reading e-mail much easier. No list is complete without the Samsung Uproar, $399.99 from Sprint, a tiny 4-by-1 1/2-inch silver rectangle that weds a Web phone to an MP3 player. The phone plays an hour of digital music through headphones, which work independently from the phone earpiece. One drawback: The keypad's minuscule buttons make dialing a struggle. But that probably won't matter to electronics hipsters. For all their difficulties, Web phones can be extremely useful--especially when you need specific information on the spot. For instance, I was recently in a Best Buy when big red tags on DVD players caught my eye. Were they really superbargain prices? I whipped out my Web phone, logged on to a price comparison site, BarPoint.com, entered the bar code number--and in seconds had my answer. The players weren't a steal. The red tags were a bit of hype--sort of like the wireless Web itself so far. By Roy Furchgott in Baltimore _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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