Mar 1, 2001 12:00 PM,

Nicety, Not Necessity

Betsy Harter

The North Amercian market may not be ready for color displays.

Today's Color Devices

Several wireless handsets and PDAs with color displays are on the market, and more are on the way.

There definitely are some color devices coming, said Sarah Kim, Yankee Group analyst, wireless/mobile technologies. The Nokia Communicator should be hitting our markets by the end of this year, and of course we have more media-oriented phones coming from Samsung and probably Sony.

Kim added that consumers are starting to demand color in the PDA space. The popularity of devices such as Compaq's iPAQ and Handspring's Visor show that people want color.

On the handset side, the Motorola Timeport P8767 digital phone is shipping now and currently is available in North America through Verizon Wireless and Bell Mobility. The Timeport P8767 uses the multicolor display technology known as Organic Electroluminescence (OEL), which was developed by Tohoku Pioneer, the company that also created color displays for stereo equipment. The P8767 displays three colors: green, blue and red, but Tohoku Pioneer expects to offer full-color technology by 3Q02 in Japanese and European markets.

Color handsets are more prevalent outside of the United States. For instance, Nokia plans to introduce its 9210 handset in Europe during the first half of this year.

The 9210 gives users a great experience in color screens, said Keith Nowak, Nokia spokesperson. It is a great display with an active matrix so you can see it from every angle.

Although Microsoft does not make wireless devices, it is partnering with device manufacturers to integrate its technology into color handsets and PDAs. Its color Pocket PCs contain Microsoft microbrowsers and actually are manufactured by Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Casio. The Pocket PC devices are available in Europe and in the United States.

One of the hallmarks of these devices is the rich color screen that is standard across the board, said Ed Suwanjindar, Microsoft mobile device division product manager. We offer all the way up to 16-bit color on the Cassiopeia device, so color is certainly very important.

Suwanjindar said the Cassiopeia can support 65,000 colors and is the richest color screen on the market today.

In addition to its Pocket PCs, Microsoft has formed an agreement with Samsung to make wireless handsets using its Microsoft's Stinger platform, which Suwanjindar said is best used on color devices. The Stinger device should be available toward the end of this year. Microsoft also is in negotiations with other handset vendors.

No Market?

Outside of the Motorola Timeport P8767, the United States lacks wireless handsets with color displays. Analysts say that since most wireless Internet browsing today is text-based, color screens are more a novelty than a necessity.

It is not just a matter of color displays, but also how to get HTML to little screens, Kim said. Right now we really don't have Java capabilities on phones, so do you really want to read your text in color?

At this point, data needs to catch up to the user interfaces in cellular phones before color displays become popular, she said.

Manufacturers seem to agree. Despite the color offering from competitor Motorola, Nokia has no plans to offer its 9210 color handset in the United States, according to Nowak.

The Motorola (P8767) is a pretty display, but Nokia really tries to not do technology for technology's sake. We are looking for applications that are really compelling for color, and we have not found that in the market today or the consumer demand for it, Nowack said. Most everything we do on the phone today is going to be voice or text, and neither one of those requires color.

Nowack said U.S. networks don't support the speeds necessary to do true HTML browsing, or even high-resolution maps, over wireless devices. However, as 2.5 and 3G networks proliferate, enabling HTML browsing, imaging and video, color screens are much more compelling.

WAP is really the way most do browsing today, and that is text-based, he pointed out. As we move into packet-data environments where you have quick data speeds and start doing things where color is needed, then, yeah, color screens definitely make sense.

Even Tohoku Pioneer, which offers 3-color OEL, will hold back on offering full-color in the United States until well beyond 2002, once 3G networks that can handle rich graphics and video are in place.

Japanese carriers are initiating 3G technology now and should have it by May of this year, and in Europe 3G is going to be sometime next year, said Takafumi Asano, Tohoku Pioneer president. The United States has no firm plans on when they will start, so the necessity of full color in the United States will come much later.

Creating full-color devices is very expensive, and until color is absolutely necessary for transmitting content wirelessly, Asano sees no ability for Tohoku, handset manufacturers or wireless carriers to profit on full-color devices.

Why Now?

Allen Nogee, Cahner's In-Stat senior analyst for wireless component technology, suggested that although color displays are not useful for WAP browsing, they do have benefits. As phones incorporate features such as MP3 players and GPS, they can greatly benefit from color displays. And, color is useful on small screens for browsing text.

Motorola's Timeport P8767 is a good example of such a phone, he said. Color is also useful for PDA functions, and PDAs and phones are slowly converging.

Nogee singled out the Pocket PC, Palm IIIc and Handspring Prism as devices that make very successful use of color screens.

These same types of units are being incorporated into phones, he added.

A few carriers have seen some benefits in color displays, notably Verizon Wireless and Bell Mobility, both of which offer the P8767.

Brenda Raney, Verizon Wireless spokesperson, said her company is using the P8767 in order to prepare customers for technology's future and to keep its reputation as offering state-of-the-art devices. Right away, customers recognize that the device is cutting-edge, she said.

You always have the early adopters who want the latest and greatest now, but you also have a segment of the population that is using mobile Web access, and the clarity of this color display makes the browsing easy to understand, Raney said.

Color displays also are great for games, which Verizon Wireless already is offering, as well as stock-market trading. Being able to see different stocks in contrasting colors makes the text easier to read, she said.

There is a variety of things that we will use color for in the future, and the color enhancement makes reading easier, she said.

David Wzorek, Tohoku Pioneer engineer, said consumers desire color displays for several reasons. For instance, the youth market in Japan has shown that handsets are status symbols as much as a communicators.

The younger crowd wants something that is different, bright and colorful, Wzorek said. Wireless users in Japan and other Asian countries are fond of sending each other text in different colors. Also, color is a natural step as the industry moves toward watching video and looking at photographs via their handsets.

Asano added that carriers and handset manufacturers that offer devices with color screens can differentiate their products and services from their competitors. For instance, instead of a green background with black text, the OEL technology offers a black background with colored text.

This is one of the biggest features that distinguishes these phones from others, Asano said. The display is bright, and the dark background makes the colored text much clearer and more readable.

According to Suwanjindar, handsets with Microsoft's Stinger, as well as its Pocket PC products, include Web browsers that enable users to browse HTML pages.

Even today, there are a lot of HTML sites with graphics that have been optimized for mobile devices, so there is some pretty attractive stuff out there, outside of WAP, he said. The ability to view all the content on the Web in color is certainly an attractive value proposition for our customers, he said.

Microsoft also has color support for pocket versions of Outlook, Word and Excel applications, so when users transfer files from desktops to wireless devices, they can view them with the same color formatting.

Cost & Battery Issues

Suwanjindar said that if a phone is going to ship with Microsoft's software, the company wants to be sure it hits the sweets spots in every area that makes phones attractive, including low prices and long battery life. However, that is not so easy with color displays, analysts said.

According to Nogee, color currently adds typically $100 to $150 to the price of a phone.

How much cost are people willing to absorb for that kind of capability, given the kind of data we have available right now? Kim added.

Tohoku Pioneer hired a company to research how much U.S. consumers would pay for color capabilities. It found that people would pay $50 more, which is in line with mid-tier mass-market phones such as the Timeport P8767.

Since there are too many phones in the market, we hope every company will differentiate their features with this technology, because right now they are not making enough money, Asano said.

As technology improves, the cost for color additions should drop. Wzorek said that OEL is in its infancy, but once the company starts mass producing the technology probably three to four years from now prices will decline.

Another issue with adding color is the toll that it takes on battery power.

To derive a color screen requires more battery power, so folks who do have color screens, if they want to make a quality product, have to engineer that into the equation, Suwanjindar said.

Compaq is using a lithium polymer battery, which is more advanced in performance, in its Pocket PC, which helps eliminate the problem, Wzorek said.

Kim pointed out that it is not that color depletes battery power so much as the fact that people who use color displays are running applications that require stronger battery performance.

If you use enhanced applications, the graphics themselves tend to use up more battery power, because it requires more processing to view them, she said. We would assume graphics would be the primary reason for having color on a display.

Tohoku said OEL technology consumes less power than a typical LCD with its backlight on, which is beneficial for Web browsing since it requires the display to be on for longer time periods.

Whether they are needed or not, color displays are nicer to look at than today's green and black LCDs. And, as prices drop, batteries improve and advanced networks facilitate graphics and video, the case for color is compelling. In the meantime, color displays are an effective differentiator for carriers and handset vendors.

Harter (betsyharter@aol.com) is a freelance writer based in Athens, GA.

Color Aside

Although Tohoku Pioneer's Organic Electroluminescence (OEL) technology enables color, the color itself may not be the technology's biggest advantage. The open architecture of OEL is built upon tiny pixels of light. Each one can be turned on or off independently, creating a fluid and smooth display. The bright illuminating pixels and high contrast makes the display easy to read.

Most wireless phones use liquid-crystal displays with black text on green backgrounds. To view the screen in the dark, the user must constantly hit buttons to backlight the text. OEL, on the other hand, is a black display behind the vibrant colored text. It is easy to see, no matter how dark it is. Conversely, in bright sunlight, the display does not wash out as other handsets have been known to do. And, it can be viewed in a 170 radius.

So if you are driving, you don't have to look at the phone head-on; you can use peripheral vision to scroll, said David Wzorek, Tohoku Pioneer engineer. The technology also has good temperature characteristics, so text is not distorted in cold weather.