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Technology Stocks : METRICOM - Wireless Data Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (2999)	12/30/2000 8:26:26 PM
From: rrufff	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

For those who think WAP phones are computers - Why WAP is whack Web phones are still hard to use ANALYSIS By Elliot Zaret © MSNBC IF YOU’VE BEEN CURIOUS about what those Web phones are like, the people who use them almost universally will tell you you’re not missing much. The menus are clunky and anything but intuitive, it takes far too may “clicks” to find the information you want, and when you finally get there, odds are you’ll get some unintelligible error. And then there’s the connection speed through cell service: it’s slow. And I mean 28.8 baud modem-like slow. And you’re lucky to get a slow connection, since all too often you find yourself in a “black hole” of cell coverage. The problems were the subject of a recent report by Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Mark Ramsay of the Nielsen Norman Group. They gave 20 people a Web-enabled cell phone that used a data communications standard known as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). After using the phones for a week, 70 percent said they would not be likely to use a WAP phone a year later. And the study was conducted in London, England, where WAP penetration and services are far higher than in the U.S. “The users’ overall impressions of WAP were largely negative,” according to the report. “Accounts were dominated by expressions of frustration, of long journeys leading to dead ends and the poor overall quality of data. Fundamentally, connection times were too slow and the data quality too variable for the users to derive much pleasure from WAP.” And Nielsen and Ramsay found that the problems weren’t related to the phones themselves - which they concluded were well designed. The problems, they said, were inherent in the service. “One thing that our study did not find was a series of horrible usability catastrophes in the WAP handsets themselves,” according to the 90-page report. “Too bad. It would have been wonderful to simply report that Ericsson and Nokia were guilty of some design stupidity and conclude that WAP would work as soon as the companies started shipping redesigned phones. In fact, people had no trouble using the phone. This means that the usability problems we found were inherent to WAP and cannot be fixed with a new phone design.” To put it more succinctly: WAP is whack. “I’ve got two wireless phones myself and I rarely can get what I want,” said Safa Rashtchy, Internet analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. Rashtchy, who covers many companies that are trying to profit off the expected wireless Web boom, said the main problem facing the industry is the horrible interface. Rashtchy found it took six clicks to find a stock quote and 12 to get the location of a Starbucks - if you knew where to click and didn’t have to fumble around looking through the menus. And every click risks getting a connection error or a long wait. msnbc.com