A little piece for Corel?
Something to nourish the Corel Computer - Nortel rumored deal. Hmmm.
Newest PC Device Is a Phone That Surfs
Web (8/26)
By TOM ABATE
c. 1997 San Francisco Chronicle
Three consumer electronics firms are expected to announce
Tuesday that they'll soon start selling $500 telephones that can browse the World Wide Web or check e-mail, using the Java operating
system from Sun Microsystems. Sun designed Java to access
networks from small devices that cost less than personal computers.
The Mountain View-based company has positioned Java to challenge
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, which dominates personal
computers but requires too much memory and hard-disk space to run
on most consumer devices.
Although the Sun-Microsoft battle over Java has created a stir in the
computer industry, consumers have so far seen few products based on
Sun's slim, new operating system.
The Java phone announcements from Northern Telecom of Canada,
Alcatel of France and Samsung Corp. of Korea, come at the opening
of the first trade show for Java products, which is supposed to bring
more than 100 exhibits and 15,000 people to New York's Jacob
Javits convention center.
`We should put the first Java phones out to test by the end of the
year, and they should be in stores by spring,'' said Ian Sugarbroad,
vice president of business development for Ontario-based Nortel.
He said the Nortel phone would have a seven-inch color monitor with
a touch screen keyboard.
Sugarbroad said the first buyers for Java phones would be executives
who have costly computers on their desk, but do little more than
access e-mail or the company's internal computer network. Upscale
hotels might also want to put Internet phones in the rooms of business
travelers.
Another possible application: banks might purchase these phones and
give them to lucrative customers to do home banking.
But Josh Bernoff, senior analyst with Forrester Research in
Massachusetts, said he doesn't see a market for phones or other
consumer devices that can access the Internet.
``When you see all the VCRs in this country flashing 12:00, it suggests you're not going to sell a lot of phones or TVs, for that matter, by making them more complex,'' he said.
The Nortel phone will be powered by a 486 microprocessor, a
33.6-baud modem and eight megabytes of memory. It will have plugs
for two standard phone lines, so users can check e-mail while holding
a conversation. The first wire-based Java phones will be followed by
wireless models, he said.
Sugarbroad said Java had two advantages over other operating
systems. It could work in a low-power, low-cost device. And the
software could be updated, over the Internet, as Sun refines Java.
(The San Francisco Chronicle web site is at sfgate.com )
NYT-08-26-97 1003EDT< |
