CES: Phones have come a
very long way
IP telephony is making
leaps forward
BY JON FORTT
Mercury News
Jan. 13, 2001
What's a phone anymore? It's hard to define.
Once upon a time definitions were easy; phones were
appliances with earpieces and mouthpieces, and they got
service from AT&T. Nowadays there are dozens of carriers and networks, some wired and
some wireless. Some phones have keypads, others just screens. To understand what's
coming in the world of phones, it's important to first understand what we have now.
On a simplified level, there are three types of phone calls we make today. First we have
landline, the local and long-distance calls we're most familiar with; if you're plugging your
phone into a jack in the wall, you're probably making a landline call. Second we have
cellular, the calls we make through mobile phones. Third we have IP calls, where the sound
travels through the same technology that's used to move information on the Internet. For
most home users today, making an IP phone call means using a personal computer equipped
with a microphone and a speaker to place free or cheap long distance or international calls.
Here's where things are headed: In just a few years, almost every type of call -- whether it's
from a cell phone, a PC or that phone in your bedroom -- will be a full-fledged IP phone
call. This can mean good things for your pocketbook, since companies like America Online,
Microsoft and Yahoo are offering free long-distance IP phone calls through their instant
messenger services. Those calls are made using Net2Phone software.
The Net2Phone folks at CES said they have a product coming out in three months that's
exactly the sort of thing IP telephony fans have been waiting on for months , a combination
circuit-switched and IP phone. What does that mean? With this phone, incoming calls would
travel over the regular telephone system as usual. For outgoing calls, however, callers with
high-speed Internet connections could choose to use either the regular telephone system or
Net2Phone's IP-based system. Long-distance IP calls would cost about 3 cents per minute,
and most international calls would probably cost 1.62 cents per minute at the high end --
that's the rate for calling Zanzibar.
Motorola introduced two innovate new clamshell phone products operating on the GSM
network, the Accompli and the V100. Both have QWERTY keyboards. These combination
phone/handheld computers can both make voice calls and do POP3 e-mail, meaning you
can use it to check e-mail from any of your existing e-mail accounts that are POP3-capable.
GSM carriers available in the Bay Area include Cingular Wireless (formerly Pacific Bell
Wireless) and Voicestream.
The Accompli is expected to sell for around $600, and the V100 for around $250.
The Accompli has a color screen, syncs to Outlook and similar software and does personal
information management much like devices from Palm. The V100 is similar, without the color
screen. The cute clam's little keyboard might remind you of Research in Motion's BlackBerry
pager. Downside? Battery. Motorola says talk time on the Accompli is two hours, which
isn't nearly enough for a business traveler to use it as a primary phone. Also, it runs on a
proprietary Motorola operating system, so it can't take advantage of the thousands of
handheld computer applications for mainstream operating systems like Palm's.
Still, this innovative product bodes well for Motorola's future. In about two years, the
company will introduce more technically sophisticated products using the Palm operating
system and the EPOC OS from Symbian. By then, advances in battery technology could
make this sort of product a real winner.
Also worth noting: Motorola's V.series 60c phone, which appears to be the child of the
v8160, is a nice improvement over its predecessor. The tiny phone's main screen displays 16
lines of text, and a small screen on the outside lets you check caller ID without opening the
phone, a feature conspicuously absent from the v8160.
Samsung said more about its phone, due at mid-year, that runs the Palm operating system.
For starters it's a beautiful piece of engineering, which we've come to expect from Samsung
phones. Its color screen is crisp, and the phone itself has all the functionality of a wireless
Palm device. Remarkably the phone isn't too big; the device is narrower than the Palm V,
and nearly twice as thick, making it too big to slide into a shirt pocket but fine for a jacket or
briefcase. Expect this CDMA phone to go for $400 or so, and to work on the Sprint PCS
network.
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