Smart Phones: Drafting

You have seen several smart-phone models. You have sat through countless demonstrations. Perhaps you are even participating in a field trial with a smart-phone manufacturer. Smart phones offer countless possibilities, but are they ready? Are your customers ready? Most important, are you ready?

Beyond the question of market acceptance, carriers still must overcome several technical hurdles before smart phones can be everything they envision. A lack of data-ready networks or a universal standard are holding carriers back.

READY? SET? NO? Perhaps the most glaring technical obstacle smart phones face at this point is a shortage of data-ready networks. Wireless carriers are upgrading their networks to carry data at higher speeds, but most transmission speeds remain relatively slow at about 9.6kb/s. In addition, the differences in digital standards will slow the development of a ubiquitous high-speed data network.

"The devices are available, but where will they work?" asked Phil Redman, Yankee Group program manager. "Wireless carriers have been slow to adopt wireless data. You can't use these phones on networks today. The networks aren't ready, and the applications are not complete."

Redman pointed out that CDMA and TDMA networks don't support data at this point, only GSM does. Lawrence Talbot, Omnipoint subscriber equipment product manager, said GSM was designed with data in mind. Since its inception ten years ago, GSM always has made data commercially available. The other technologies are just now starting to play catch up, he said, but so far, data is not offered ubiquitously on either CDMA or TDMA. Ed Dempsey, Practical Sales Tools president, said this lack of preparation is because some carriers are not confident in wireless data; therefore, they have not equipped their networks. Dempsey likens the wireless data market to an old adage: No one will build a highway until they have a car, and no one will build a car until they have a highway. Handset manufacturers say they have the car: a smart phone. They are just waiting for the highway: a network that can handle high-speed data. Conversely, carriers will not prepare their networks until they can offer customers a wide variety of handsets.

Howie Waterman, Bell Atlantic Mobile (BAM) staff director of public relations, said getting BAM's CDMA network geared for data will not be time-consuming or expensive; it will take just a matter of weeks. But BAM will only do so after manufacturers provide more handsets.

"I mean two, three or four manufacturers with CDMA data-capable handsets so that we can offer customers these phones at a good price, which will only come with competition," he said. "Rolling out the service and making a big deal out of it without a number of handsets to offer is probably not going to happen, from our perspective."

Qualcomm remains optimistic. Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm president of consumer products, believes carriers soon will equip networks for data.

"This year networks will be up and running on a fairly widespread basis," he said. "We are participating in trials, so I can say this is finally the year of wireless data, when you can walk outside and still be connected."

Dempsey said CDMA carriers are trying aggressively to get networks up in response to Qualcomm's pdQ CDMA smart phone.

"There are several networks that are not data-ready right now, but I know they are aggressively trying to get them up because they see potential," he said. "The networks are not there, but they're coming."

Sprint PCS is one such CDMA carrier. The company plans to offer a nationwide network equipped for data later this year, said Terry Yu, Sprint PCS vice president of product management & development.

"That means anywhere on the Sprint PCS network where you make a voice call today, you will be able to have a data session," he said. "That will be enormous to the industry because you now can buy virtually any phone and make a voice call or roam. You cannot do that on data."

Some GSM providers already offer data. Talbot said GSM technology guarantees 9.6kb/s throughput. Omnipoint successfully demonstrated 14.4kb/s in one of its markets and will test general packet radio service (GPRS) sometime this year.

"GPRS gives you throughput speeds that rival landline connections," he said.

WHAT'S YOUR FUNCTION? Another critical challenge to the widespread adoption of smart phones is that they must offer many functions and, most important, applications specifically designed for these devices. Software that offers specialized network services, like Internet access and e-mail, will increase the phones' appeal to a mass market.

Angie Lynch, Espial Group director of corporate communications, said although smart phones can handle various applications, you must be careful not to clutter them with information irrelevant to customers. The main features people want in a smart phone are Internet access, e-mail and a personal information manager.

"With those three things, people will have complete access so they don't have to carry around a cumbersome laptop," she said.

But Dave Rensin, Riverbed Technologies CTO, said carriers should not try to offer complete Web access on smart phones because the form factors do not lend themselves to Web surfing.

"Carriers, on a consumer basis, would be better off if they picked a few domain areas they wanted to attack -- news, sports, weather, movies -- and build custom applications to do that because they could shave their data rate and conserve bandwidth substantially," he said.

Rensin suggested that you offer e-mail, then integrate your own applications.

"Instead of giving people the ability to generically surf the Web, which is an uncomfortable experience on a smart phone, give them the functionality with which they want to surf the Web anyway," he said.

Bill McKell, Horizon PCS president, also said specialized applications will be the way to go. Before leaving for a skiing trip last winter, he was trying to decide whether to ski in the morning or the afternoon the next day. He was able to check the resort's weather up until he pulled out of the driveway.

"For the next six hours on the road, there was no way to keep up to date on what was happening. If I had the capability to access the Web, I could have seen the weather as we traveled."

With targeted applications, Rensin added, you can charge data at a flat rate, to which people have become accustomed, because you can predict how much each person will use.

However, if you want to crack into corporate data sales, you must demonstrate value beyond e-mail, news, weather and sports. Technology that allows your customers to connect their mobile devices to their enterprise data sources is one such example.

Practical Sales Tools' Dempsey said sales-force-automation tools, for instance, give sales representatives real-time access to the corporate office database. Consider this scenario: A customer calls your company. A CSR takes the trouble ticket and resolves the problem. When the sales rep in the field gets on his smart phone, he can see what the CSR did five seconds ago. He knows what is happening at the office and does not have to wait to synchronize. It is just like being on the LAN. Dempsey pointed out that such an application saves on hidden costs. Companies don't have to hire anyone to support the mobile field force because the application sits on the corporate side. Also, they save hours of prep time.

"With a smart phone, you have access to your database wherever you go," Dempsey said.

Omnipoint's Talbot said he would like to see more seamless access to remote information and the Internet.

"In the past, in order to seamlessly access information, you had to first sign up with a regular Internet service provider in advance," he said. "Smart phones have also had that problem, a time-consuming, cumbersome connection issue for the ISP and the network operator."

The smart phones that soon will launch should offer more streamlined access because the browser is built into the phone, he said.

The next group of smart phones will have more capabilities because the bandwidth will be much larger. Third-generation phones will be able to download data at rates of 2Mb/s in an ideal office setting and 384kb/s on the street. In seconds, 3G phones will download data that took several minutes or even an hour to download with earlier technology.

Increasingly, phones will integrate with smart cards to conduct e-commerce. Devices will store cash value or connect to a bank account. They also will be used to make small purchases and serve as e-currency.

WAP'S GOING ON? Although not as big an obstacle, standards for sending data from Web sites to wireless devices still are evolving. According to the Wireless Applications Protocol (WAP) Forum, Internet standards are inefficient over mobile networks. Mobile phones' small screens generally cannot display HTML Web content effectively. WAP solves these problems using binary transmission for greater compression of data and is optimized for long latency and low to medium bandwidth.

WAP 1.1 now is in proposal form. It specifies, among other things, wireless markup language (WML), an extensible markup language (XML) application. XML is a generic language that allows desktops, televisions, phones and other devicesto read Web pages. WML is specific implementation of XML for small-screen devices, Yu said.

"Within six to 12 months, every Web site will be able to read WML," said Haroon Alvi, Nokia Mobile Phones director of business development. By the end of 2000, there will be 10 million phones globally that will include WAP, and by 2004 or 2005, more handsets will be connected to the Internet than PCs, he added.

Yu said the WAP Forum started out as a technical group that wrote specifications, but it is reaching a new level at which it will communicate the benefits of browser phones and applications to carriers, consumers and application developers.

The WAP Forum is unsure whether its branding campaign will refer to the initials WAP, or some other term with which consumers can identify more easily.

"It will be something that shows them a site is WAP-compatible so they know they can also visit the site with their phone," Yu said.

Riverbed Technologies' Rensin said one flaw with WAP is that it doesn't translate HTML sites. Some companies make middle-ware to translate HTML to WML, and carriers can install middle-ware on their servers that will translate HTML to WML, he said.

Yu said Web-site developers will have to reformat their own sites to make them WAP-compatible, but doing so will not be difficult.

"Many Web sites allow you to choose a graphic view or text-only view today. You also will be able to choose a phone-size view, but it is not automatic," he said.

The WAP Forum will facilitate the development of tools that will help people convert sites to WML easily, much like tools exist today to create HTML Web sites.

"We want to make it real easy. Maybe some day it will say 'Click here to convert the site from HTML to WML.' Widely available, easy-to-use tools are coming," Yu added.

Microsoft's joining the WAP Forum brought a measure of relief. Waterman said there was some fear that Microsoft would go its own direction and create a competing technology, holding the industry back from a standard browser and forcing confused customers to make a browser choice. Because phones are much smaller than PCs, there is no room to install several browsers and let the customer choose which one to use, Yu added.

As smart phones roll out, their availability will vary among carriers. Those who offer smart phones will participate in a large and expensive field trial.

What will sell a smart phone? Lawrence Talbot, Omnipoint subscriber equipment product manager, said customers will demand the following features:

1. Scheduler

2. Contact list

3. E-mail

4. Remote access to information:

* World Wide Web

* Corporate intranet/LAN