Headsup on pdQ and similar devices ...
The article below reminds us of the complexity of PCs doesn't it? .... these are small little PCs we hope to carry around ... I wonder if the pdQ (and other devices) will be the same out of the gate ...
October 5, 1999
Asian Technology
Nokia's Communicator Needs Work
Before Consumers Try to Go Online
By STAN SESSER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
I WAS HOPING to write this column about the experience of connecting to the Internet from a mobile phone.
I'm not talking about a scaled-down mini-Internet, which certain cell phones in Japan can now reach, but the real Web in all its glory. The vehicle is the Nokia 9110 Communicator, a mobile phone that flips open to reveal a little computer screen and keyboard. The 9110, which costs about $1,000, is the only mobile phone on sale that gets you to the Web, and Nokia lent me one to try out.
Here is my conclusion: With the 9110, I've found perhaps the most obtuse, infuriating and pernicious high-tech device that I've ever stumbled across.
The instructions didn't help a bit. The 171-page owner's guide, the 30-page "Quick" Guide, and the help function on the accompanying CD-ROM read like parodies of user manuals. Visiting the retail stores of several mobile-phone operators in Hong Kong wasn't fruitful either; they didn't have the slightest clue. And when I called my Internet-service provider, a technician said no one there knew anything about it.
So after having devoted chunks of several days to the effort, I couldn't figure out even where to begin to set it up for Internet use. On a hunch, I called the Nokia spokesman who had demonstrated his 9110 to me when I visited Nokia's Helsinki headquarters in July. Knowing the Finnish penchant for telling the truth, I asked him if he had set it up himself. No, he admitted, he was given the phone ready to use.
Admittedly, there are lots of obtuse, infuriating and pernicious high-tech products on the market. Why pick on the 9110?
THE ANSWER is that the mobile phone is the technology revolution's most user-friendly product, but that may be about to change. Next year, almost all new mobile phones will be more than telephones. They will be instruments of "convergence," the trend that is starting to blur the distinction between cell phones, hand-held computers such as PalmPilots, and laptops. Under a new standard called wireless application protocol, or WAP, the new crop of mobile phones will have access to scaled-down Web sites that are easier to handle on the small telephone screen.
If these new WAP phones -- Nokia's version, the 7110, will start appearing in a month -- resemble the 9110, we are in trouble. Sure, we still will be able to make calls on them. But what about the extra bulk, the extra price? Will the Internet function prove as useless to us as the advanced programming features of video cassette recorders, just because the companies that make them have no interest in the question of whether their customers can figure them out?
OK, back to the 9110. Imagine having a mobile phone in front of you with the capability of connecting to the Internet. What would you want to know?
The first question, it seems to me, is whether Nokia has its own network with its own phone numbers to connect you to the Internet. If not, how do you connect to the same Internet-service provider that you use for your computer? Do you download its software from your computer to the phone? If so, how do you do the downloading and installation?
Then what happens if you are in another country? Many ISPs, including mine, contract with a company called iPass for roaming, which requires more software. How do you download and install that?
Here is the most relevant passage I could find in the owner's guide to answer those questions: "To obtain access to the Internet ... you must have entered an Internet Access Point [IAP] from an Internet-service provider, and you must have entered proper Internet settings. Your service provider will give you instructions on how to configure the Internet settings. Follow the instructions carefully." No mention of roaming or anything else. And, as I mentioned, my ISP had no instructions to give me.
What about e-mail? Is the 9110 able to retrieve Web-based e-mail such as Yahoo and Hotmail? Again from the manual: "You need to have an e-mail account and it needs to support SMTP protocol for sending and POP3 or IMAP4 protocol for receiving e-mail. The Communicator also has MIME1 support." (I later got a more direct answer from Nokia: No.)
I SHOULD MENTION that the instructions had at least one sentence I could easily understand. Under "telephone," the Quick Guide tells us: "Telephone is used for making and receiving voice calls."
In complete frustration, I picked up my office phone, the device I personally use to make and receive voice calls, and spoke with Lisa Stewart. Ms. Stewart, a Hong Kong investment manager, had inspired this whole thing in the first place by sending me an ecstatic e-mail about her 9110.
"I store phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail addresses and even digitized photos of my kids," she wrote. "On the Eurostar, under the English Channel, I can call my kids back in Hong Kong before they go to bed, send and receive e-mail from the office, and warn my client in Paris by fax that I'll be a little late. I can then check into my Internet book club and see what everyone thought of the last book before posting my own thoughts, and finally, just before getting to Paris, check the closing market prices in Hong Kong."
"How did you manage to set it up?" I asked. "It was really, really difficult," she replied. "I just kept going at it. I said to myself, 'I bought this thing, I'll make it work if it kills me."'
Nokia has an explanation for this whole mess. A spokesman in Helsinki said that because Nokia doesn't use its own proprietary system for connecting to the Internet, the 9110 has to accommodate a large number of Internet and e-mail protocols, which makes the settings complicated. "We've developed a number of easy ways to set up the Communicator for e-mail," he said. "They're not detailed in the manual because they're the service provider's option to install."
In other words, the mobile-phone company, or the ISP, can send a message to your 9110 with all the configurations in it. You push a button, and the phone is ready to use. But there's a slight caveat: Nokia spokesmen in Hong Kong and Singapore couldn't come up with a single ISP or mobile-phone operator in Asia that actually provided this service.
Before the first WAP phone docks in Asia, let me make a suggestion to Nokia and other manufacturers: If this is what WAP phones will be like, restrict your retail outlets to those that will install everything before the customer takes it home. You'll win a lot more friends that way.
Otherwise, if we are looking at the wave of the future in this new generation of mobile phones, I'm going to find a time machine to take me back to the past. My guess is that the time machine will be a whole lot easier to set up.
Write to Stan Sesser at stan.sesser@awsj.com |
