A guide to the wireless Web: What your mobile phone can and cannot do with the Internet.
Options: Technologies on the Horizon
The Internet now reaches your digital phone -- without wires. But it's not the Internet you know
By now, you're probably already aware that E-mail and Web surfing are available on digital phones and other handheld devices. Well, if the prospect of watching people in restaurants and ticket lines tap away at their mobile phones to exchange E-mail, shop, or trade stocks bugs you, look at the bright side: Would you rather they were talking?
The top two tool-toys of the new millennium -- the mobile phone and the Internet -- have finally melded. Through Sprint's PCS Wireless Web service, the itty-bitty displays of properly equipped digital phones now present live Internet E-mail, news, shopping, and trading.
Sprint's service tips an iceberg of wireless Internet services now coming online not only for phones but for pagers and handheld computers as well. By 2003, according to GartnerGroup's Dataquest, 33 million people will add themselves to the ranks of those in the United States already sending and receiving E-mail and other nonvoice data -- like that airline reservation to Omaha and your sister's E-auction bid on that great Farber Bros. decanter -- wirelessly.
If you need anywhere, anytime access to E-mail and the services of the most popular Web sites (and only the most popular Web sites), Internet-connected digital phones, handheld computers, and other wireless gizmos soon to come promise powerful convenience. But don't take promises of "the power of the wireless Internet in your hand" or "Web w/o Wires" too literally. None of these devices enable you to hop onto the Web and browse around wherever you will, as you can do on a bona fide computer.
The "Mini" in the Browser
Phones equipped for Sprint's Wireless Web feature a "MiniBrowser" program. Pay close attention to the first four letters of that name.
The "browsing" available from Sprint allows you to choose from among a list of popular Web sites -- Yahoo, Amazon.com, CNN.com, and AmeriTrade, to mention a few -- that have repackaged their content in a special text-only, simplified version for display on a phone. At this writing, the list features a few hundred sites, but that number is growing steadily.
You do just about everything on the Wireless Web simply by pressing the phone's dialing buttons to make choices from text menus on the phone's display. Graphics are gone -- including the banner ads that clog many sites. Going graphics-free not only permits practical use of a phone's tiny display but also keeps performance snappy -- which is important, since you pay for Wireless Web by the minute. (See "Early Adopter," below.)
In addition to using the featured sites, Sprint users can sign up for "Web updates" -- data such as sports scores, stock prices, and auction status delivered to your phone automatically. You choose which updates you want to receive from the Sprint PCS site or from the site where the news originates (such as Yahoo Mobile). Unlike Wireless Web, Web updates require no special phone; all Sprint PCS users can sign up for them.
But How Do I Type?
On the wireless Web you occasionally have to do something other than choose from menus. Composing messages, telling Amazon.com which book to find, or selecting a stock all require typing text. And that's when an Internet phone's biggest drawback becomes most obvious.
For activities requiring text entry (such as composing E-mail messages or adding a speed-dial name), each dialing button has four characters assigned to it; for example, press the 2 button once to type a, twice for b, thrice for c, and four times for 2 . Obviously, this is not the means by which you would want to ask Amazon.com to find Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). But it's tolerable for short search terms, stock symbols, and boilerplate replies such as "Thx 4 msg. Will call u."
There's a stopgap to the text trouble: you can buy a cable ($100 to $200) to connect Wireless Web-enabled phones to a Palm or Windows CE handheld computer or to the standard serial port in a notebook (or desktop) PC. The phone then functions as a wireless modem, enabling the computer to dial up any Internet provider. That's not as perfect a solution as it sounds: current wireless technology limits the connection speed to 14Kb, one-quarter the speed of a regular dial-up 56Kb connection and pretty poky for Web surfing -- though adequate for E-mail. But the pitch is that users can do much of their work from the phone alone and need to resort to the cable scenario only rarely.
Limitations notwithstanding, it's surprising how much one can actually do on these downsized sites through the phone alone. Yahoo, for example, offers access to all its services (other than Web searches), including E-mail, a personal scheduling service called Calendar, and Web updates of scores, auctions, and stock prices. When your E-mail and calendar are on the Yahoo portal, you can access them from any computer (notebook, desktop, Palm, or Windows CE) that has Web access and from your mobile phone. Shopping sites generally offer catalog searches and full ordering capability -- though without graphics, of course, you buy sight unseen.
More Handheld Net Coming
At this writing, Sprint Wireless Web is the only nationwide carrier offering anything approaching true Internet content over a telephone, although a few regional digital-phone companies (like Bell Atlantic Mobile) are rolling out similar Internet phone services. Some other telecom carriers provide limited sorts of wireless Internet-based services. GTE Wireless and BellSouth Mobility, for example, both let you compose a short text message on a Web site or in an Internet E-mail program and then send that message to appear on the display of a GTE or a BellSouth Mobility subscriber who pays for the optional text-messaging service. BellSouth customers can also get automatic news updates from CNN, similar to Sprint's Web updates. But is all this the same thing as getting the Internet on your phone? Hardly.
