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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here
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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (7673)7/18/2000 1:38:38 AM
From: Jeff Hayden  Read Replies (1) of 12823
 
I have the AT&T Mitsubishi T250 phone that uses WAP over CDPD.

I have to put in two bits for why WAP isn't the greatest - but it is somewhat useful. The speed of the connection isn't all that bad. What is bad is the dinky screen and the almost useless keypad as a keyboard. WAP reduces everything to many levels of choice menus where you can keep pressing number keys to walk down the menus. Each menu can only support 2 or 3 words before the line runs off-screen. To read the rest of the line, you step to it and it will begin scrolling sideways. You click a software programmable key, usually programmed to mean OK, to go to a deeper menu or the final end page - which may be a news item or the weather in a city you've chosen.

The speed is just fine for a device that has no screen on which to display detailed things. If WAP includes pictures - this phone doesn't implement that.

Now, do I like it? Well, yes, so far. It is very slick for getting a preview of my e-mail. I can read the text messages just fine - of course I can't download the attachments. I also use it to check the market indices and my stocks as well as some news and weather items.

Another nice thing - You pay a fixed fee each month for the PocketNet service and you can use as many minutes as you want - it's not charged to your monthly minute allotment.

A bad thing - You can get a laptop connection for the phone but AT&T charges $0.05 per kilobyte. So, if you move 1MB it costs $50 - yikes!!

The plan I'm on is Digital One Rate with the full-up PocketNet services. I will drop the full-up part and back off to just getting e-mail and the news and weather items. The full-up includes the PIM stuff - contact manager, schedule, to do. This stuff is useless when the net doesn't come up - so you're much better off with a Palm or equivalent. In fact the Palm with wireless modem may be a better way to go all around - at least it has a bigger screen and it's easier to input on.

I agree with you're thinking that WAP probably won't last. It may be the only realistic way for my phone to work on the web. I feel the phones will become much more capable. Maybe Palm ought to come out with a wireless PIM that just happens to include a phone?

As an aside, I do like AT&T's Digital One Rate. It is expensive, but it really does work almost everywhere, including on the old analog systems. The One Rate allows unlimited roaming over any system without extra charges. On quite a few occasions now, my friend with a Sprint phone has had to use mine because his didn't work in certain areas. AT&T's TDMA ain't really all that bad.

Jeff
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