Re: 3G Wireless Devices - The Challenges - long but good article
It is good to see someone post on this much neglected thread.
<< PDABuzz.com >>
Good sight!
As the world moves towards combining the functionality of a cellular phone and a PDA their are lots of challenges. Some are addressed in this article.:
>> 3G Device Squad
Brian Quinton
Telephony
Dec 4, 2000
Needed for 3G Wireless: Enormous Changes At The End Of The Network
Let's say the bandwidth necessary for third generation has been bought and sold, and the carriers interested in making the transition to next generation wireless service have their infrastructures up and humming. None of those things will send a byte of data over the airwaves - or produce a nickel's worth of incremental revenue for service providers - without crucial changes in the hardware and software deployed at the user's end.
"The experience of using the Internet over a mobile phone has been totally oversold to the American public," says Jeff Hawkins, chairman and chief product officer of personal digital assistant (PDA) maker Handspring. "The arrival of 3G will only widen the gap between expectation and reality unless the telecom industry spends a lot of effort revamping its end devices."
Those changes will be all the more important because, according to recent studies, much of the U.S. population is adoption-averse when it comes to wireless Internet services. Jupiter Communications found that 39% of mobile device owners say they do not have any need for wireless data services. Among respondents who owned a mobile phone or a PDA, 32% said they would not be willing to pay more for Internet service over those devices, according to the same study. So much for pent-up demand.
With that kind of indifference in the air, device manufacturers must make sure that their appeal is strong, at least to the early adopter crowd, and that those early customers get perceived value quickly and reliably.
Of course, those proportions could shift dramatically once 3G's faster 2 Mb/s download speeds arrive, opening new possibilities for video e-mail and multimedia downloads. But the likelier prospect is that the inconveniences of accessing the Internet over mobile devices will create a kind of backlash among at least some of those early customers.
Screen Stars, Key Players
Yes, the Internet is about data in all its forms. But the form of the Internet that most consumers are used to is the Web, and that's a very visual medium - either text-based or design-based - requiring some serious real estate, even if the pages are simplified.
Basically, screens must be bigger and better. The standard 2- by 3-inch handset display screen is positively claustrophobic for performing even the simplest Internet functions, including reading and composing e-mail, which consumers say is the Web tool they most want to see translated to their phones. Current Web-enabled phones, from Sprint and Motorola among others, have three to five lines of 15 to 17 characters per line. The Qualcomm pdQ can handle 12 lines of 36 characters per line, making it one of the most expansive screens around.
Those larger screens, in turn, will affect the devices usability - making handsets larger, consuming more power and taking more processing power to run. In some cases, such as delivery of complex data or services, users might get better results by downloading onto a PDA rather than a mobile phone.
Palm and other Internet device manufacturers have begun talking about future PDA models that will plug into mobile phones and use them as wireless modems; that could provide at least a good transitional technology to 3G, ensuring a satisfactory experience for early users while building up a user base for wireless Internet applications.
Entering information using a numeric keypad is another potential frustration, requiring three strokes to the same key just to get to the correct individual letter.
"That's fine if all you want to do is respond to an e-mail with yes or no answers," says Mark McKechnie, an analyst with Banc of America Securities. "But try to imagine typing in a long URL, complete with function keys for back-slashes. You're going to get awfully bored before you reach the end of a particularly long address."
Some of these problems can be solved with technology, but a more likely solution may be to recast the public's expectations of accessing the Web via 3G phones. Functional limits and a relative paucity of bandwidth will prevent 3G phones from rivaling other sturdier devices as a full-on Web-browsing tool, says analyst Michael McGuire of Dataquest. "3G is not designed to be a primary synchronization technology," he says. "The public will have to wait for 4G to get there. 3G will be more of a query-browsing tool, searching for answers to specific questions."
More Power to Ya
Battery technology has come a long way, but it seems to have plateaued. The lithium-ion battery, currently the most powerful rechargeable battery available, can store up to 75 W/hours per pound - almost four times the charge per pound of the average car battery - yet it still provides only about two hours worth of continuous talking time in a mobile phone.
That won't be enough to power the high-resolution color display screens that most analysts expect will become a sine qua non for 3G phones. Current mobile phones consume 0.5 to 3 W of power, depending on usage patterns. Larger screens with color displays and better pictures could boost that requirement to 4.5 to 6 W.
And that's just for the exterior effects. Powering the CPU for data applications can require an additional 15 million to 60 million instructions per second (MI/S) at a power cost of 1 milliwatt per MI/S. Location-based apps, video imaging and gaming software all impose an additional burden on the battery.
Research will come to the rescue, but how soon is questionable. Lithium-ion polymer batteries can be manufactured as thin as 2 millimeters and molded into shapes, raising the prospect of a phone whose very case is its own battery.
And Bluetooth-style wireless networking technology could provide a solution, says David McCartney, vice president of sales and marketing for Bosch Telecom. Users might carry a small wireless transponder in their pocket that would network remote servers to any peripheral devices they needed, including a 3G mobile phone. "That would reduce the power requirements for individual devices, allowing them to operate with smaller, lighter power supplies," he says.
These battery breakthroughs can't come soon enough for 3G. People are going to expect their mobile phones to be as dependable - and as dependably powered - as their wireline units, McCartney said. "Users tell us they need a full day of use out of their phones or a couple of days of standby power. Ultimately, they want to recharge their phones once every five or seven days."
Standards Bearers
So much for the hardware requirements. When it comes to operating protocols for 3G phones, things get really messy.
The protocol available in Internet-enabled phones sold in the U.S. now is the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), described by the WAP Forum as "an open, global specification that empowers mobile users with wireless devices to easily access and interact with information and services instantly." Built around a proprietary browser technology from Phone.com, WAP can run across circuit-switched or packet-based networks.
Although open in architecture, the i-mode standard is proprietary to Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. Built to optimize the spectrum available for voice traffic in its home country, i-mode also allowed NTT DoCoMo to begin offering value-added service on its planned 3G network. At the time of its invention, in first quarter 1998, WAP 1.0 existed only in unratified form so the carrier went ahead and developed its own standard, tailored for its needs.
One major difference between the two is that WAP consciously set itself apart from the Internet, with its own separate protocols for session initiation, transport layer security and transactions, while i-mode opted to parallel the Internet's architecture. Most significantly, WAP uses its own special wireless markup language; i-mode scripts its content in compact HTML, an adaptation of the standard HTML used on the Web. To many developers, the steep learning curve involved in rewriting Web pages for WAP will constitute an unnecessary obstacle to the spread of the wireless Internet over 3G phones.
Users of WAP phones can only access sites that have been purposely rewritten for that standard - approximately 1000 sites at current count - while i-mode users can reach 20,000 sites, most of them "unofficial."
Because i-mode is a proprietary technology, its global spread will be more complex than that of WAP, which has the support of the 500 carriers and manufacturers that belong to the WAP Forum. NTT DoCoMo has struck important investment deals to disseminate i-mode in Europe and is rumored to be talking with SBC Communications and BellSouth for a stake in their Cingular Wireless venture.
Meanwhile, WAP 2.0 is waiting in the wings, and Phone.com CEO Donald Listwin said in September that his company "will not hang our hat fundamentally and only on WAP."
"This is not about WAP or i-mode," he says. "This is about WAP and i-mode and what we need to go forward. WAP is not static." Phone.com has since indicated that the next release of WAP will move closer to HTML.
"That makes sense, but the conflict of two very different standards will still put a damper on the spread of 3G services unless it's resolved by the time the network infrastructure is in place," McKechnie says. "The bare fact is that most manufacturers will always prefer to sit out a standards battle until there's a clear winner, then rush in. That's not the way to grow a 3G market. You have to have the devices and applications ready to go when the network is in place." <<
- Eric - |
