Nortel and Cellnet Seek Objective Future to Mobile Interfaces
By Jeremy Scott-Joynt
15-DEC-97
As the mobile world meets in Madrid to decide what standards path to take to the third generation (3G) of mobile networks, some companies are preparing to take practical steps towards building their own multi-media mobile networks of the future.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ The arguments in Madrid will decide what radio interface the Universal Mobile Telecoms System (UMTS) will use. But the experiments Nortel is undertaking with UK operator Cellnet could help define something just as important: how customers interact with the information they receive and just what information they want anyway.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Cellnet is testing the use of Nortel's Orbitor system, a screenphone with associated network and server equipment, which is designed to take web-based services and deliver them directly to customers via their mobile phones.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ It is vital exercise. Initiatives such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) UMTS procedures will deliver the standards equipment manufacturers need to bring product to market economically, but it will be products like Orbitor which will influence whether customers will actually want to use them.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Cellnet's testing of Orbitor will it, and other operators, understand how customers might want to use 3G systems, and other mobile networks that go beyond providing simple voice communications. It may also show whether tomorrow's mobile data users will expect to see the same interface they have on today's PCs, or whether in fact they will actually want something lighter, slicker and, potentially, entirely new.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Already, as far as Nortel is concerned, there is evidence that tommorrow's 3G phone users don't want to have to use today's PC interfaces. "Computers scare people", says Phil Terrett, Orbitor's global product manager. Consequently, he points out, the hundreds and buttons and myriad features buried deep within obscure menus and opaque PC filing systems go largely unused. That's OK if you are prepared to waste a small protion of a multi-Gigabyte hard drive. It's not what you need to design friendly, easy to use hand-he;d terminals.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ With Orbitor, says Terrett, Nortel is exploring how to deliver of PC-like flexibiltiy, but with mobile phone like-simplicity, with the key being the provision of what Nortel's calls "soft" controls. These controls can be as many and as varied as those available to the PC user, but delivered in such a way that the user is only really aware of them when the need arises to use them. "The way we see it is you have thousands of buttons, but one at a time, and only when you need them," Terett explained.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ This is very different from existing personal digital assistants (PDAs), which slavishly follow the 'here's the keyboard, here's the screen' pattern of the laptop PC. These, Terrett insists, are a niche market for those few who need to carry a PC of a sort at all times.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Nortel's approach is not simply to port the Web onto a handheld. Terrett says the Web's largely text-led approach amounts to providing a new computer that relies on old-style command-line user interface. For this reason, he believes the Wireless Application Protocol, an effort by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and US browser maker Unwired Planet to design a way of translating the HTML code which makes up Web pages so they can appear on small-screen portable machines, is doomed to failure - even though instant access to the billions of bytes of existing Web data, without having to rework them for a new medium - must have its attractions.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ But screenphones are still essentially computers, which means an operating system; and here Nortel believes it is ahead of the game by building the entire operating system in Sun Microsystems' Java language. Java is object-oriented, designed to deliver applications as modular, reusable blocks of code. It is a paradigm Nortel and other manufacturers increasingly believe is perfect for the constantly changing demands that future multimedia applications will make on the control sets of their mobile terminals. Want a new application, need a new control: just let your mobile phone automatically pluck it as a Java applet from the database behind the base station.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ However, even Java is dominating the mindshare of modern telecoms equipment makers, once any discussion turns to the issue of operating systems, it becomes dificult to ignore the products or the strategies Microsoft.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Microsoft's stripped-down Windows operating system, Windows CE, is already becoming ubiquitous on handheld PCs or PDAs, and a slim version of the Internet Explorer browser could be quite easily become a smartphone interface. Although Bill Gates expresses no interest in telecoms networks, his striking push into the Internet-on-TV market suggests he wants to attack the mass-market consumer's access to data and multimedia, and smartphones would be a logical next step.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿ Or at least a logical next step for Microsoft, but does it really make sense in terms of the technology required to really make mobile multi-media sfeedback
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