Sunday May 20 9:22 AM ET
Glitches to Send Smartphones Off Course for Years
By Lucas van Grinsven, European technology correspondent LONDON (Reuters) - Engineers like to
call current cell phone networks the most complex technological systems ever invented, so it is perhaps
no great surprise that the next generation of mobiles is suffering from teething problems.
The problem is the Internet and it will take years to solve.
A slew of bugs have been exposed in a new range of high-tech mobile phones, which offer permanent
Internet access as well as voice services, and telecoms companies have been forced to recall hundreds
of thousands of faulty handsets.
``It has taken four years for (current) GSM phones to stabilize, and this new technology is going to
destabilize it (mobile phones) again,'' says Hugh Brogan, chief executive of British mobile phone maker
Sendo.
In Japan, the first country to pioneer mobile Internet access, Sony and Matsushita Communication
Industrial Co Ltd offered to replace over half a million phones which suffer from software glitches. The
problems struck a few months after a range of bugs emerged in hundreds of thousands of handsets of
NTT DoCoMo (news - web sites), Japan's top cell phone group, which are made by Sony, Swedish
Ericsson (news - web sites) and Hitachi Kokusai Electric.
Software glitches have also prompted NTT DoCoMo to delay to the autumn its planned launch of the
world's first, third-generation (3G) mobile phones, which are billed to offer super fast Internet and
multimedia services.
In Europe, where debt-laden telecoms companies have spent 120 billion euros on 3G licenses and are
expected to spend around the same again to develop and deploy the new services -- despite nebulous
future revenues -- this sends a stark message.
Amid recriminations between telecoms operators and suppliers, British Telecommunications Plc this
week also delayed Europe's first 3G phones on the tiny Isle of Man because of dogged problems with
handsets.
``This is not magic, it takes time to test the phones and networks,'' said Lauri Kivinen, communications
vice president at Nokia (news - web sites), the world's largest mobile phone maker.
But even while industry players such as Nokia are pushing back once aggressive timetables, the
long-established GSM technology, which has been around since 1992 and has grabbed around 60
percent of the worldwide mobile phone market, still suffers from setbacks, as Finnish wireless operator
Sonera found on Wednesday.
Sonera said it would recall 360,000 SIM cards, which identify the phone and authorize its use,
because phones were freezing up due to faulty software on the chip.
PHONES ON STEROIDS
``In some ways it is to be expected, because the horsepower of these phones is increasing and the
networks become more complicated,'' said Bob Schukai, European director of third generation
products at U.S.-based Motorola's phone unit.
``The phone software is not only used to retrieve some telephone numbers from a SIM card, but now
it must also retrieve email and calendars,'' he added.
These phones-on-steroids are becoming so complex that engineers have been working around the
clock to solve software problems on 3G phones in Japan, which had been scheduled to launch at the
end of this month.
``The only thing that seems to work right now is the video conferencing,'' one industry source told
Reuters.
A key problem with 3G mobile phone networks is the handover between base stations if a mobile
phone user is moving out of the coverage area of one mast and into the next.
Both in Japan and on the Isle of Man this handover glitch causes phones to drop connections. This is
caused by the infinitely more complex structure of 3G networks. While experts do believe this problem
can be solved, it will take time.
Another problem for 3G phones is that they not only need to distinguish between voice traffic and
Internet data, but also need to be able to fall back on to a slower, second-generation network when
the phone moves out of 3G coverage areas -- which are expected to be limited to top cities.
Even if the industry has figured out how to settle these issues, 3G specifications need to be accurately
implemented across different equipment from dozens of manufacturers.
``It'll take years to solve,'' said Deutsche Bank analyst Pontus Gronlund.
HANDSETS THAT DO EVERYTHING
Not only will networks be more intricate. The cell phone of the future is to become a phone, a wallet, a
diary, a database, a walkman, a TV and a camera. All in one.
And it is the new applications that are being rushed into phones which are blamed for most of the
problems with current Japanese handsets.
Sony phones with a built-in MP3 music player would sometimes crash if a call was coming in. Then
there are several problems with java, the software language used to transport new applications into a
phone and which allow phone users to keep adding features, such as new Web browsers and games.
But there are interpretation differences of java-code which is being defined in an industry standards
group, said Schukai.
``The specifications of NTT DoCoMo's java are not nearly as tight as ours. They're outside the
standards group,'' he said.
However, handsets and computer servers all have to support the same version of java -- or risk a
systems conflict.
Ben Armstrong, principal consultant and mobile communications specialist at
PricewaterhouseCoopers, says GSM standards also had to solve hundreds of problems, noting it
would be unrealistic to expect newer systems to be easier.
``Realistically, it will take probably two to five years before there is a stable platform for consumers,''
he said.
Over the past few years, many mobile phone users have learned that a mobile phone can crash as
easily as a personal computer (PC). But although future cell phones may be just as smart as a PC --
they should eventually be more reliable.
``We will not accept the instability of the PC platform,'' Armstrong said.
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