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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 49thMIMOMander who wrote (6931)	8/8/2000 2:21:10 PM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Interesting article from the Sunday Times (London) July 2. July 2 2000 DOORS Wap takes the rap Strictly speaking, Wap stands for wireless application protocol, a technology designed to put a web browser inside any compatible mobile phone. Believe none of it. The true translation is what a palaver, and the chances of your using it in any meaningful way are pretty much zero. I was at a mobile-phone conference the other week and inquired, casually, who among the assembled telecoms hacks and execs there actually relied on Wap for anything useful. Even the sales people responsible for telling us this stuff is so essential seemed hard-pressed to work up any enthusiasm. Nine months ago, we were all being told that Wap was a revolution that would draw us away from PCs and turn the mobile phone into our primary window onto the web. Now the story is changing. Wap, as we know and hate it, is merely in version one. This explains why it is dreadfully slow, horribly unreliable and deeply unpleasant to use. Add to this the Nokia 7110, the loathsome lump of plastic thrust at us as the ideal cheap Wap phone. This has had more bug revisions than Windows - each one demanding a return to the Nokia dealer, since the net-savvy beast is incapable of updating its memory from the web directly. Hang around one of the Nokia newsgroups and you soon appreciate the agonies a number of 7110 users have undergone trying to elicit a reliable service from their handsets. What a palaver: trying to use a Wap phone to access the internet Anyone actually using Wap to pick up e-mail or run an online bank account deserves a medal, or at least a subsidy from the phone companies to pay for all those calls needed to extract any worthwhile information out of the average service. Inevitably, the phone biz has an ace up its sleeve. Even better technology is around the corner that will deliver the goods, and all you need - surprise, surprise - is to buy yet another phone. There is something to be said for this idea. Ericsson, which in my book makes much better phones than that other Scandinavian giant, Nokia, recently showed me the little beauty they will be releasing next Christmas. The R250 comes brimming with awesome features. Place it on the table and it becomes, without pressing a button, a powerful speakerphone. Pick it up and hold it to your ear and the thing reverts back to being a personal handset. It has voice recognition built in, along with support for Bluetooth, the next-generation wireless standard that will let it communicate with similarly equipped palmtops and notebooks. It also has support for general packet radio service (GPRS), the coming data standard for mobile phones. With GPRS your phone is always on and you are charged per chunk of data, not by the second. So your e-mail turns up without you having to log on, and GPRS promises much faster data access than the snailphones we use at the moment.

To: 49thMIMOMander who wrote (6931)	8/9/2000 7:45:33 AM
From: Hassell Anderson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Ilmarinen Anyone familiar with the standardization process also knows that although operators have different and specific needs, as well as compete, still have long history of working out global glitches, one way or the other, especially building and implementing global standards. Good point, and yet another reason I don't expect the Brits to wait. VOD should deploy CDMA 1x ASAP. As a shareholder in VOD, I want to see a return on that spectrum investment. By the time w(ait)CDMA is ready, multi-mode phones and/or standards convergence will nullify the only valid argument in favor w(ait)CDMA - roaming. The longer w(ait)CDMA takes, the faster its raison d'etre evaporates. Hassell