Web Phones: They Connect, but Do They Score?

by David Tenenbaum

Face it—the '90s are over, and it's time you began connecting to the World Wide Web through your cell phone. Not ready? Then listen to what Humphrey Bogart said as he parted with Ingrid Bergman at the airport in Casablanca: "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and someday soon" you'll need wireless access to sports, stocks, and news through a pocket-size gadget.

That, at least, is the overheated hype from the fantasyland of high-tech. "Soon almost all of us will be permanently connected to the 'Net through small, portable devices that we will carry everywhere," Computerworld gushed last fall.

We can only imagine Bogart responding, "Baby, that all depends on what you mean by 'soon.' "

If Bogart read market research, he'd have noticed a recent survey by the consultants Accenture, in Chicago, which found that, globally, only 15% of people who own a cell phone or personal digital assistant wanted wireless Internet.

In the U.S., only 6% of the 80 million users of cell phones now have Web access. Key stumbling blocks include cost and the greater capacity of PC-based connections.

I tested the new Sprint TP3000, a do-all digital cell phone with a miniature browser, to-do list, organizer, memo pad, modem simulator, and calculator.

After just 45 seconds of button pushing—including connect time—Fidelity.com tells that the Dow is, well, "10051 3.77.83." I found no help deciphering the "3.77.83," … maybe if you have to ask, you don't belong here. Instead I downloaded a 100-word article on the market from Yahoo!, and learned that the three major indexes were all up.

Reasonable results?
Other attempts at finding information were equally unreliable. Hungry, I searched the "pizza" category and found a Pizza Hut in 45 seconds. After the connection went bonkers, I reconnected, and pressed one button to phone the restaurant and place an order.

Things were a lot worse as I traveled in San Francisco, where I actually wanted to find some music, not just test the phone. Since the system did not recognize "San Francisco," I plowed through a menu structure and reached California, at which point the system decided I must be in Salida, Calif., wherever that may be. Although I could not convince the network that I was in San Francisco, at least I found there was no jazz in Salida.

After my return home to the Midwest, I searched for driving routes to some hospitals. The better directions took me on radical detours; the others were wrong. Good thing it was a test. I'd hate to be bleeding to death, squinting at a tiny LCD (liquid crystal display) screen, careening madly down the wrong road to the ER.

Mistake.

At Gladiator, where "two men enter the arena, but only one will leave," the screen explained how to lunge, jab, and strike, but the "game" was less than thrilling since the characters were represented by crude symbols.

I tried blackjack. Unable to grasp the instructions for a game I already knew, I moved to hangman. The computer chose a word, I guessed "e" and the system inserted "e" and "v;" apparently it "thought" I'm an English idiot, not just a Web phone idiot. Then the all-knowing network coolly informed me "t" is not a valid letter! Enlighened, he wrier evenually undersood ha i's errific o wrie wihou "t."

Could the system find a flight arrival? I combed "my wireless Web," the portal to many services, and after a very tardy connection, finally found Northwest.com, where I learned a flight's departure and arrival times, and even the weather at the destination.

Also on the positive side, I did manage to find my home-repair book at Amazon.com ["The Complete Idiot's Guide to Trouble-Free Home Repair," by David J. Tenenbaum, ISBN 0028610423]. I also managed to find a conversion for dollars into pesos.

Overall, the Sprint $400 TP3000 is a well-designed, compact device, with a smart union of organizer data and the telephone. And the Web integration, while inconsistent, does hold promise of convenience. It's awful handy to phone a business by pressing a button once you've found it in the electronic equivalent of the yellow pages.

Another interesting Web phone is the $500 Kyocera Smartphone QCP 6035, which has an organizer using the popular palm operating system, a mini-Web browser, and good integration of phone and contact information.

To browse and browse not
But there were problems with my Sprint phone. It was hard to move about the Web. The phone assumes you want to start at the last Web page visited, so to go back eight screens, you either press the "back" button eight times or return to the browser home page. Either process can be time-consuming and you may lose the connection before it works, but unless you've bookmarked the page, there's no other way to return.

In the wireless Web today, user-friendliness does not seem the dominant credo. With so many functions, it's inevitable that a Web phone can be confusing. Between the touch screen, the <OK> and <Clear> and <End> buttons, and the four-way navigation switch, there are many ways to do the same thing—with slight but annoying inconsistencies. Sometimes you reach the next screen by pressing the <down> button on the screen. You may respond to a "more" prompt by pressing the mechanical <OK> button—or the <more> button on screen.

It gets worse: Depending on what you're doing, the touch-screen buttons may include <menu>, <back>, <next>, <done>, <info>, <cancel>, <goto>, and <action>. Entering text can require tedious punching on a "qwerty" keyboard [the conventional keyboard layout] on the touch screen with your stylus. And yes, you can crash the phone—at least one of the two beefy manuals tells you how to recover.

Granted, Web phone technology is young, and it's not fair to judge the gadgets too harshly, or to forget that technical hassles, delays, and dead ends also plague the wired Web.

The harder they phone
As with other high-tech gadgets, the continual introduction of new systems and features makes it hard to offer buying advice. We will, however, assure you that a Web phone is a major status totem among the 20-something crowd.

It's hard to imagine that wireless will replace the wired Web—at least while screens are measured in millimeters—but it may earn its keep if you spend a lot of time on the road and can tolerate frustration.

Other advice:

• Web phones are convenient for accessing e-mail on the fly; make sure the download speed is fast enough for your purposes.



• Web phones are best for looking up nuggets of data about stocks, sports, news, weather, or traffic, rather than for browsing.



• Integrating an organizer and a cell phone makes sense, whether or not the gadget has Web access.

While Web phones themselves may be impressive, behind the scenes, the wireless Web is less than enchanting. Despite all the hype, few Web sites display information in a Web-phone-friendly format, and those that do seem to specialize in errors.

This could be, as Bogart said to Claude Rains as Bergman's plane headed for the runway, "the beginning of a beautiful friendship" between humans and Web phones. But to know for sure, we'll need to read the script.

Wait! Maybe there's a 100-word version on the wireless Web…

Published July 23, 2001

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