How about playing Sweet Home Alabama instead of a ring? Mark
Wireless Finns provide glimpse of future
By Marco della Cava, USA TODAY
HELSINKI, Finland - Janne Vainio looks and sounds like a serious adult. Then, his mobile phone rings: It plays Lynyrd Skynyrd's rebel classic, Sweet Home Alabama.
''This is one of 150 pop songs you can download into your phone to serve as your ring,'' grins Vainio, 37, vice president of mobile telephone services at Finland's top phone company, Sonera.
''But of course this is a lot more than a phone,'' he says. ''It's a remote control for your life.''
As the millennium nears, most of us have put aside visions of commuting like George Jetson or living on Mars. But in the realm of communications, looking at Finland is very much a glimpse into the future - and Vainio is one of 5 million disciples of a wireless world.
Despite its small size and relative isolation in the Arctic Circle, this Nordic nation is leading the pack in mobile phone technology and its applications. So ingrained is the wireless mentality here that many new homeowners never bother ordering fixed-line service.
Two reasons: First, the country is a laboratory of eager users. An astonishing 60% of Finns own mobile phones, compared with about 25% of Americans. Then, there are the innovative companies. Nokia recently passed the USA's Motorola as the leading supplier of mobile handsets, with 37.4 million sold in 1998.
The result is that Finland, in a few years' time, will pioneer the use of so-called ''Third Generation'' mobile phones that boast lightning-quick access to the Internet, just as they are currently pushing the envelope with existing models.
Today in Finland you can use your phone to:
Send text messages to other users instead of calling them. SMS (Short Message Service) is exploding, particularly among teens, who like its low cost and classroom-friendly silence.
Purchase items ranging from mints in a vending machine to a car wash by phoning a number that charges the goods to your phone bill.
Send instant postcards of yourself by shooting a picture with a digital camera, uploading it to a mobile phone with Internet access, then sending it to Sonera, which for $1.50 prints the image with your message and mails it.
The goal of the Finnish mobile providers is to make the portable phone as indispensable as oxygen. No one is betting against them.
''Finland will hit 100% penetration by late 2000,'' predicts Christian Kern, London-based wireless analyst for Salomon Smith Barney. ''For the average person, having a mobile will mean not having to carry an ATM card. It will be your cash, your access to the Net and more.''
Connecting to the Net through a capable handheld unit will revolutionize mobile phone use in the USA, says Ken Woo, Seattle-based spokesman for AT&T Wireless.
''The Internet drives everything. The killer app (application) that hopefully will push our use up to the level of Finland is high-speed data,'' Woo says. ''There is such a pent-up demand for (portable) data services in the U.S. that voice will just be along for the ride on this one.''
Future factory
Stepping into Nokia headquarters, home to 20,000 employees west of downtown Helsinki, brings a shock of recognition.
It is a steel and glass campus reminiscent of Microsoft's wood and glass campus near Seattle, complete with water views and a workaholic corporate culture. (The inside joke is that Nokia's slogan may be ''Connecting People,'' but its staff's reality is ''disconnecting families.'')
But industriousness has paid off, judging from a lobby display of everything from boxy old phones to shiny new possibilities, from 30-pound 1970s behemoths to the slim Third Generation-wonder, the Nokia 7110, due out in September.
''From ears to eyes,'' says Ilkka Raiskinen, vice president for business development, setting the 7110 in front of him. In a few flicks, he's on the Internet, checking Nokia's stock price.
''Mobile phones are a platform just waiting for additional services and content,'' he says.
The future, according to Nokia, includes phones that would take advantage of high-speed data connections to provide videoconferencing. It also includes locator-based services, which amount to your phone acting like a global positioning system for service providers.
The concept is simple: You find yourself in downtown Helsinki and want a good restaurant or hotel. An on-screen prompt offers you a number to call to access the local tourism board's database, check hotel availability and even reserve a room.
''It's not science fiction,'' says Raiskinen. ''All the elements are already there. In a mobile society, your phone is your virtual you.''
Banking on such scenarios are Finnish content providers such as Alma Media, which owns a TV station, 30 newspapers and various new-media ventures.
When Timo Saari is not in California working on his Ph.D. at Stanford University (his topic: psychological reactions to communication technology; his thesis: people project human qualities on gadgets), he is helping develop Third Generation visions like this one.
''Your phone will know where you are at all times,'' he says. ''It will provide you information based on your profile. News. Sports scores. Whatever. As you walk a block, ads will flash onto the phone's screen, perhaps a beep alerting you to a sale going on inside a store you've passed. Or as you turn a corner, an alert telling you not to go that way because there's a gas leak.''
Saari's vision seems a bit like a citified version of a stroll through Bill Gates' interactive house, where a clipped-on gadget tells the home's computers just where you are in the house and activates lights and music accordingly.
''I've read forecasts that say that by 2010, people in the U.S. will spend at least half their free time with a mediated experience, where information is coming at you from elsewhere,'' he says. ''So the key is personalized information.''
Classroom chaos
As with many trends, the mobile phone revolution is being fueled by kids.
Finnish pre-teens often are given phones by parents who are eager to keep track of their offspring as well as teach them lessons in money management. As a fallback, mom and dad can call a number that instantly shows them their child's bill.
In area high schools, chirping phones are ubiquitous as students text-message each other as a means of social interaction.
This includes passing on jokes (downloaded from area service providers, much like parents download stock quotes and weather forecasts), circulating chain letters and even relaying answers to test questions. This last practice has caused teachers to collect phones before exams.
Kids have become so facile at creating text messages with a single thumb punching a phone keypad that retailers stage promotions where the fastest finger in Finland wins a free phone.
Adults have their own addictions. Esa Puotinen , a banker in his 30s, uses his phone to look at his checking account balance and shoots friends a half-dozen or more text messages a day.
''I would be lost without my phone,'' he says. ''When I leave the house, I take three things of equal importance to me: my keys, my watch and my phone.''
Why the Finns, in particular, display such a passion for technology may involve both geography and personality.
When telecommunications developed in earnest in the '70s, Finns were more inclined to pursue wireless options because the costs of running cable to isolated pockets of a vast and frozen nation were daunting.
As a result, wireless became a government and private sector priority. Interestingly, mobile phone services or hardware have never been subsidized here, which some experts point to as the reason for Finland's exponential growth in penetration: As prices fall, more consumers get interested.
The other factor is a national characteristic of polite reserve, seemingly the enemy of chatting away on the phone. On the contrary.
''We see ourselves as quiet people from the countryside who have gradually shifted to the cities in the past few decades,'' says Pasi Maenpaa , an urban sociologist at the University of Helsinki. ''Mobile phones have been amazing because they make us talk.''
Maenpaa has done a variety of studies sponsored by Nokia. His findings include the fact that Finns ''want to control the future which is coming at them. There is no broad definition of utopia, only individual definitions of the good life that include choosing when and where and with whom you're in contact.''
The national mania for mobile phone use - whether it's downloading a new ringing tone, text messaging a would-be date or simply talking - has in fact prompted some discussion of etiquette.
Some Helsinki restaurants are putting up ''no phones'' stickers, showing a phone with an X through it; trains have special sections for talkers. Most agree that in church and movie theaters, phones are taboo.
''If there is a Finnish philosophy on this, it's 'don't bother other people,' '' says Nokia spokeswoman Marianne Holmlund, who wears her wireless phone like jewelry on a long silver chain and fields an average of five beeping text messages an hour.
''In a country where most people have mobile phones,'' she adds, ''the most important thing to remember is that it has an off button.''
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