Where Are the Phones?

Turning a mass-market mobile phone into a network-based smart phone involves compliance, technology, design ... and patience.

Service providers will be launching WAP services; manufacturers will be delivering WAP-compliant products; developers already are launching new applications; the content is available; and all of the programs and applications are available. So when can Scott Goldman, WAP Forum CEO, stop hearing the WAP-scrambled acronym, "Where Are the Phones"? Very soon, he said. Three or four months from now, WAP-compliant phones will be released, and the waiting will end.

Goldman uses the following analogy: "It's like when cellular was converting from analog to digital," he said. "Everybody was waiting for digital and talked about when it was going to happen. Eventually, when it happened, no one remembered analog anymore."

In countless reports and studies, Goldman's analogy seems to ring true. A report from the Strategis Group said beginning next year, the majority of new handset models will be WAP-enabled. A study by Datamonitor reports that by 2005, almost 70% of wireless mobile subscriptions will be WAP-enabled. And Strategy Analytics suggests that about 95% of smart phones shipped to the United States and Western Europe in 2003 will be WAP-enabled, and 70% will have Bluetooth technology.

All of these predictions are encouraging for phone manufacturers that have been working toward the "all-encompassing" WAP-compliant phone for more than two years. The three founding WAP-Forum phone manufacturers — Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have developed WAP-enabled phones, and each company has a WAP phone slated for release in the United States later this year.

However, there has been confusion about what classifies a phone as WAP-compliant. There are many pre-WAP handsets on the market that use Phone.com microbrowsers, but no handsets currently in the market have the WAP-compliant 1.1 microbrowser. That is changing. According to Goldman, the WAP Forum has a WAP certification test under way so that manufacturers can test their handsets against several gateways through a third-party independent source, allowing a reference pool to be created within the industry. When the optional test is passed, the manufacturers can use the WAP logo as an indicator that the phone is WAP-compliant.

"It's like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," Goldman said.

According to Skip Bryan, Ericsson director of technology market development and a member of the WAP Forum board of directors, the manufacturers believe the soon-to-be-released phones are compliant, but are still in the process of getting certification from the WAP Forum. He's confident that the phones will pass.

"The risk is there to both the operator and the manufacturer that if these aren't compliant and have to be recalled to be reflashed with software changes, then it would be costly to both parties," Bryan said. "So there's a reasonable certainty allowing us to go forward in business selling these products."

The certification process has been straightforward. Combining the technology and the design to make a successful WAP phone, meanwhile, is tricky.

Making a WAP Phone
Obviously, the mechanics of a WAP phone vary from previous mass-marketed wireless phones. According to a white paper, Back to WAP Basics: A Technical Review from Mobile Lifestreams, WAP takes a client-server approach. It incorporates a microbrowser into the mobile phone, requiring only limited resources on the phone. This makes WAP suitable for smart phones. WAP puts the intelligence in the WAP gateways. Microbrowser-based services and applications reside temporarily on servers, not permanently in phones.

Ericsson's Bryan said that WAP is a paradigm shift in the way phones are being viewed. With previous phones, you had little extra memory left in the device, and substantial changes had to be made.

"(Handsets) were really a closed platform," he said. "By opening the phone to accessing the world through a browser, you need a faster microprocessor to handle the real-time operation like more RAM and ROM for resident program memory and for the random-access caching of information that you may download off the Internet."

Bryan added that previously, more than 95% of the processor capacity was involved in voice services. Now, faster microprocessors and the ability to host more software and applications in the device are available and affordable.

It's also important to consider that in WAP-enabled phones, not all of the functionality features reside in the phone.

"It's a distributed feature," said Donal O'Connell, Nokia vice president of R&D. "You've got to think of the phone not as a standalone unit but as a terminal that interfaces to a server, which then connects you into the World Wide Web. From a design perspective, that's when you realize that you're not acting alone."

Being able to see that Internet connection on a small display screen also proves challenging.

"The constraints and the environment you have to work in now means that you've got to be very clever," O'Connell said. "When people access the Internet, they expect to have a nice display with Yahoo, lots of colors, hot buttons, favorite links and so forth. And you've got to shrink that down into something's that portable."

The key to a small screen size is to simplify the browsing capabilities as much as possible. For example, the Nokia 7110 series has a bigger display than non-browser phones. Nokia's NaviRoller, a scroll and clicking mechanism that also can be used for text input, simplifies navigating content. The NaviKey offers embedded predictive-text software that has the functionality of a full keyboard using nine buttons.

Ericsson's WAP-enabled handsets also feature predictive-text-input software that anticipates what word or phrase you are writing. Several phones have notepads with handwriting recognition, similar to a Palm device. Bryan concluded that core design elements such as bigger displays, faster microprocessors, small handset size and growing capability are elements that are coming together at the right time. Plus it's affordable.

"Moore's law has driven the price down," Bryan said. "So that gives us more capability to put in new features and functions as well as higher chunks of memory at a lower cost."

Getting the Word Out
Many service providers are offering pre-WAP phones in order to introduce the mobile Internet to customers. However, some wireless providers are cautious of rushing into offering Internet service.

"We have a customer base with a fairly high expectation of what Internet access is like in both speed and for richness in content," said Carlton Hill, BellSouth Wireless director of Internet initiatives. "So I do believe there'll be a little bit of disappointment at first from folks whose expectations are not managed correctly."

Hill added that if providers correctly tell the customer what they're providing — access to real-time interactive transaction-oriented data services that are useful to them when they are in a wireless environment — then customers will expect the right thing and providers will be able to deliver that with some great benefits.

Some of the industry have compared WAP to Japan's i-Mode, a successful wireless-Internet venture. But the WAP Forum's Goldman warned that this is not a fair assessment.

"It's easy to get off the ground when you're not trying to build a standard by consensus among 500-plus companies around the world," he said. "We have not created one standard that's just going to stand still. Rather it evolves with all of the new technologies."

That evolution also includes migrating pre-WAP HDML handsets with WAP-compliant WML handsets. According to John Yuzdepski, Sprint PCS vice president of Sprintpcs.com and also a member of the WAP Forum board of directors, HDML and WML are quite similar and will co-exist for a long time.

"There will be quite an elegant migration for all our sites (from HDML to WML)," he said. "In the long term, though, WML will probably prevail."

Providers such as BellSouth Wireless have watched other service providers offer pre-WAP Internet access, and have learned that customers don't care what technology is involved, but what they will get out of that technology.

"We are finding in our experience of watching the market that the trick to wireless-Internet access is not actually providing the access or the interface, whether it's WAP or HDML, but it's what you provide an interface to," Hill said. "It's how rich the information is at the other end and how appropriate the applications are to the mobile user."

The convenience of getting information in many scenarios is a strong motive for WAP to grow. But in order for WAP-compliant phones to take off in the market, a combination of things needs to happen. According to Nokia's O'Connell, it's not just the manufacturer's release of the WAP-capable phone that is important.

"The technology, various applications and benefits to the end user need to be there," he said. "The marketing promotions, the advertising campaigns and the buzz also need to be there so the early adopters take it on board and people see others using it."

Once the WAP-compliant phones reach the mainstream, customers will see the true benefits WAP technology has to offer.

"We are at the Star Trek age where you aren't going to think about where you are when you want to get a piece of information," said Ericsson's Bryan. "You're going to be able to get it."