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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: S100 who wrote (2446)	12/26/2000 11:03:00 PM
From: S100	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12230

'The Point of Stability' In a bid to make the wireless Internet more attractive, leading mobile operators, including British Telcommunications PLC's Cellnet unit and T-Mobil, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, completed GPRS upgrades to their networks several months ago, but a lack of handsets has meant that they have been unable to launch full-fledged services. "All this is a new technology, but we are just reaching the point of stability on the handsets," says Stuart Newstead, general manager of wireless data services for BT Cellnet. Motorola, which had only a few hundred prototype phones available at midyear, now says it is producing "thousands" of handsets for each of its customers, which include BT Cellnet, T-Mobil, Mobilkom in Austria and Telsim in Turkey. Another GPRS pioneer, French phone maker Sagem SA, is shipping GPRS phones to operators in East Asia, including 30,000 to Taiwan. Telefon L.M. AB Ericsson of Sweden is gearing up to produce commercial volumes of its first GPRS phone in next year's first quarter. snip snip No 'Guinea Pigs' However, some phone makers such as Nokia Corp. still don't believe that GPRS technology is mature enough for prime time. Nokia's latest top-end mobile phone/personal organizer hybrid, due to appear in March or April of 2001, isn't GPRS-compatible. "We don't want our customers to be guinea pigs," says Tapio Hedman, a Nokia spokesman. "GPRS will have a more profound impact toward the latter part of 2001." Nokia's caution is striking, given that the Finnish giant was the first phone maker to release a wireless Internet phone at the end of 1999. However, Motorola maintains GPRS is mature and stable. One possible stumbling block with GPRS is that its "always on" feature could run down a small handheld device's limited battery. Sagem plans to launch a handheld computer with a built-in GPRS transmitter in the first quarter of next year. Sagem says the device, which uses Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system, will have a black and white screen because a color screen and GRPS together would be too big a drain on the battery. But BT Cellnet's Mr. Newstead brushed off these concerns, saying the demands on the battery shouldn't be significantly higher than with conventional phones.