IP: THE PDA+PHONE DILEMMA

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 18:06:45 +0200
To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: THE PDA+PHONE DILEMMA

Introduction: Geoff invented wireless email in the early 80's while at
SRI -- the late Internet protocol czar Jon Postel assigned him "port 99" for
his tinkering.  In the late 80’s he founded the second commercial Internet
company, Anterior Technology, as well as founding, RadioMail, the first
wireless Internet business in the early 90's.

THE PDA+PHONE DILEMMA How Lineage Influences Outcome,
   by Geoffrey S. Goodfellow

The PDA+Phone Situation: As Viewed from Prague

Let me start by saying I have been a Nokia Communicator 9110 addict since it
was first available in the later part of 1999 here in Central Europe
(http://www.nokia.com/phones/9110/index.html).  The joy of a single device
that does The PDA+Phone Thing "all-in-one" is just plain nifty, especially
when it seamlessly synchronizes with your Outlook contact & calendar
database.  The 9110 without a doubt is The “pocketable” Dream Machine I've
always wanted to have ever since I first experienced wireless network access
on the ARPANET via the University of Hawaii’s AlohaNet, the first wireless
packet radio data network, in the 70’s during a summer vacation there.  (Pop
Quiz: Did you know that the Ethernet `wired’ LAN concept was inspired by the
AlohaNet `wireless’ data network? Yup, that’s right, wireless bagats wired!)

That all said, I have been following the PDA+Phone sphere with an eye to
upgrade to the new Nokia 9210 or possibly Something Else, like the
Handspring Treo.  I have held off from the new 9200 series Nokia
Communicator for the following reasons:

1. The only difference between the new 9210 (Symbian OS) and the old 9110
(Geoworks OS) "appears", on the surface, to be a snazzy color screen and
dual-band GSM 900/1800 (both Europe, Africa, Asia) radio frequencies.  I
would have jumped into the 9210 straight away had it also included:

2. GPRS capability. The 9210 does not have GPRS capability (or a GPRS
“upgradeable” capability like the Treo purports),

3. Present Day “Full World” GSM frequencies (900/1800/1900 Mhz).

Even more disappointing, the 9210i, the "improved(?)" 9210 version that is
now starting to be distributed over here in Europe does not have GPRS or the
Present Day Full World GSM frequencies. It seems you folks in the U.S. are
"lucky" to now get a GSM 1900 Mhz (only) version of "yesterday's technology"
of our former 9210 (non-'i' "improved") model called the 9290.


What's Really Needed: I believe for Nokia's 9200 series of Communicators to
be successful, future iterations will need to (now) add:

1. QUAD-band radios -- i.e. the 900/1800 Mhz GSM frequencies used in the
Rest Of World (outside of the U.S., except Japan) + 850/1900 Mhz GSM
frequencies used in the Americas.  At the end of the day these High-End
PDA+Phone devices absolutely, positively need to have Maximal Capability
(along with their sure to be Maximal Price) to be Maximally Used anywhere a
GSM network could possibly exist on the planet (except Japan).

[Note: the "ante" here was recently raised for all manufactures of Higher
End Devices from TRI-band to QUAD-band radio's because of AT&T and
Cingular's decision to retrofit their legacy analog AMPS and digital TDMA
850 Mhz frequency networks in the U.S. with GSM network technology. More
about all these different “flavors” of networks in the U.S. in a moment.]

2. GPRS -- General Packet Radio Service capability – GRPS gives you the
ability to send and receive small, individual bursts of data, in packets as
opposed to setting up and maintaining a full-blown circuit switched call.
Circuit switched calls have inherent setup and tear down overhead/delays.
Think of "Always On GPRS" as like being on your Ethernet LAN in the office
or DSL/Cable at home vs. dialing-up through the analog or digital Public
Switched Telephone Network with ISDN.

[Caveat: the GSM network providers have, so far, for the most part, priced
GPRS into the stratosphere.  Example: here in the Czech Republic the price
is about U.S. $1 per MB, so the subscriber uptake has been somewhere between
slim-to-none.  I have hopes for future price reductions once the carriers
want to try to make a bit of ROI on the substantial outlay in deploying GPRS
on their networks. Counter example of somewhere that Gets It Right:
Croatia's GSM networks GPRS price is 5 or 6 cents U.S. per MB.]

3. USB – Currently you can only connect to your PC for communication and
synchronizing via slow serial port technology.  Most annoying is that new
laptops don't even have serial ports anymore thereby requiring you to lug
around a USB to serial converter frob.

4. Jenny Craig visit -- just little lighter as well as thinner (but not
necessarily smaller) in the weightyness/love handle thickness department,
please.  I’m a believer that there are real and practical limitations on the
size you can make a Real Keyboard for Serious Typing as well as a “mock
24x80 PC style” display size for Real Viewing.  I often sit in a cafe and
let my thoughts flow into my Nokia 9110. I couldn't imagine doing this on a
Treo style keyboard.

5. MMS capability – Multi Media Messaging -- MMS works much the same way as
SMS, but allows users to combine audio-, graphic-, text- and imaging content
in one message.  To date, Nokia has announced six MMS-capable phones, but
the 9200 Communicator series at present is not one of those six capable MMS
phones.


The DNA Conundrum: The Biggest Dilemma of how Really Good the PDA+Phone
combo devices “are” and which one to go for always seems to derive from
their progenitors lineage:

Are you from the Dessert Topping or the Floor Wax Family when you are trying
to pass yourself off as the master of both?  I.e. is Your DNA from The Phone
Industry family or The Computer Industry/PDA Family – and, how successful is
Your Genetic Engineering Team at splicing the genes from The Other Family
into The Mutation you engender?

Your Genetic Disposition/Programming *is* what determines if you have a PDA
First to which a phone capability is added in, or whether you have a Phone
First with some PDA functionally grafted on.  What generally happens during
the slicing, dicing and splicing process is that you end up with a
Frankenstein kind of device that no one really likes or wants.  I am very
gratified that Nokia has continued to invest through the still-born,
abortive, teething and “deformative” Suffering Years of what was just
miserable, embarrassingly low (and I mean Really Really low) uptake during
the evolution from the brick 9000, 9000i, 9110, 9110i to the 9210/9290 and
now 9210i.  I anxiously await their next iteration, hopefully with the
additions outlined above.


Special U.S. Considerations: Buy The Network, Not The Phone: In the U.S. The
Most Important Detail to carefully consider is actually not The Phone you
want to buy, but The Network it will live/operate on.

In the Rest Of  World (except Japan) The Flavor of the network is not really
important because you have just One Choice: GSM.  In the U.S. The Flavor of
the network *is* everything because you have [too] many of them, all
different.  Let's get under the network covers a little more:

The U.S. has quite the alphabet soup collection of incompatible cellular
network flavors deployed today [with more coming tomorrow], such as AMPS,
CDMA, GSM, iDEN and TDMA.  Within this group of network flavors you'll find
the likes of 2G, 2.5G, 3G, CDMA IS-95, CDMA2000 1XRTT, CDMA EV-DO, WCDMA,
GPRS, EDGE and UMTS.

This U.S. specific multi, incompatible network situation is actually nothing
new, believe it or not. The historical pre-cellular mobile telephone network
palette included the likes of IMTS, SMART, Rydax, AutoTel, MTS, 600/1500,
2805 and Reach, among others. (In the pre-cellular days I had the “pleasure”
of having 4 (yes, four!) different mobile phones on different frequency
bands and signaling methods in my car.  Maybe you can imagine the curious
looks I got as I drove around with That Antenna Farm sprouting on the trunk
lid – but I was connected! J)


Breadth and Depth Coverage: Each of the present day U.S. cellular network
flavors have been deployed for a varying amount of time, and, thus have
various degrees of ubiquity/coverage.  AMPS is the oldest and most
ubiquitously deployed.  With AMPS, which is analog, you will find the Widest
Coverage (most available) in the U.S. and therefore, Best Breadth.  AMPS
will also likely provide you with the best Depth of Coverage, meaning
reaching inside for good “in building penetration” (of the radio signal).

The newer networks in the U.S. are the 1900 Mhz GSM (primarily Cingular &
VoiceStream) as well as 1900 Mhz CDMA2000 (SprintPCS) flavors.  These 1900
Mhz networks are likely to offer the least breadth and depth of coverage
because:

1. They have not been around as long as the 850 Mhz AMPS, TDMA & CDMA based
networks and thus their coverage is not as wide spread (breadth) and good
inside buildings (depth).

2. The 1900 Mhz networks require 2-4x the number of base stations for
equivalent “breadth and depth” of coverage of 850 Mhz networks and thus more
capital outlay and engineering.

[A historical aside: when the cellular network concept for mobile telephony
was invented by Bell Labs in 1947, it was envisioned as a Car Phone Only
service, not the Portable hand-phone system that (heretic of the day) Marty
Cooper at Motorola imagined.  So, when the first cellular networks were
constructed, the AT&T AMPS networks were designed and engineered like the
AT&T trial system in Chicago: for Car Coverage.  This meant, for example,
that when NYNEX turned on the New York City system they did not bother to
put base stations in and around Manhattan, instead choosing to surround the
city with cell sites.  This lead to the “Canyon Effect”, where calls would
drop as you rounded a street corner. Depth of coverage was nil, so in
building use was non-existent.  In Washington DC where Motorola and American
TeleServices had their trial system, supporting the DynaTAC portable
hand-held phone, base stations were located in and around the heart of the
down town area. This provided Really Good in building depth of coverage from
the first day of service. I had access to the Motorola DC test system and
sat on the FCC and EIA cellular standard committees. We had no end of fun of
chiding our AT&T colleagues that "if they put base stations in down town
areas like New York, they would become overloaded because subscribers would
use them – which is a nice problem to have, eh?]


Which Network’s PDA+Phone to Buy: To put it bluntly: what good is *any*
phone if you can't reliably place and receive telephone calls?

The VoiceStream and Cingular 1900 Mhz GSM networks in the U.S., where the
Nokia Communicator and Treo currently operate, are not exactly known for
their stellar coverage (breadth or depth).  VoiceStreams new owner, T-Mobile
(aka Deutsche Telekom) like most telecom players these days is feeling a bit
bruised and poor since it "over purchased" VoiceStream for way too many
billions during the go-go days in 1999.  VoiceStream also just happens to be
the smallest "national" network player in the U.S. and will require
Substantial Follow-on Investments to further build out, congeal and
seamlessify its patchy coverage during a time when the market itself is
engaged in a price war.  Not a pretty picture!  We are Very Likely to see
some consolidation in the offing with either a Sprint PCS & Verizon [CDMA
network technology], Cingular & AT&T or Voicestream with Cingular or AT&T
[GSM network technology] marriage sometime in the not too distant future.


My recommendation: For prospective PDA+Phone purchasers in the U.S. my
recommendation is to: wait.

I recommend you wait until the PDA+Phone combo device you lust for is
available on a widely deployed 850 Mhz national network such as Verizon
(CDMA).  You can also wait until such a time as the SprintPCS, VoiceStream
and Cingular 1900 Mhz networks have built out their coverage to match that
of the 850 Mhz operators.  That won't be tomorrow, by the way.

If you absolutely Must Have it now: There are some half-way, stop-gap
measures such as SprintPCS offering "dual-band, dual protocol" phones.  With
a dual-band phone when coverage of Sprint PCS’s all digital CDMA 1900 Mhz
network blanks out, the phone switches over to an analog 850 Mhz AMPS
network, thereby allowing you to place and receive telephone calls -- the
whole point of buying a mobile phone, right?

Sadly, the U.S. 1900 Mhz GSM network operators don't seem to have embraced
this half-way analog fall-back measure to tide their customers over until
such a time as they are as widely deployed with coverage as that of their
850 Mhz AMPS/CDMA/TDMA brethren.


A Final Heads Up on U.S. PDA+Phone Buying: Unlike in the Rest Of World
(except Japan), the mobile phone you purchase in the U.S. will Only Work on
the network technology that it was made for.  So let’s say you buy a 1900
Mhz GSM phone such as the Nokia 9290 Communicator or Treo. Later, you
discover that the GSM coverage sucks, which it mostly does in the U.S.
Then, not only do you pay The Penalty of breaking the contract with the
network provider (VoiceStream or Cingular), but you also end up with a phone
that can't be re-used on another network – a double loss situation.

In the Rest Of World, like here in the Czech Republic, there are (only)
multiple GSM network providers.  If the network or coverage is lousy on
Provider A, you can re-use the same phone on Provider B or C.  [In places
like Australia they have taken this concept a step further by mandating
Number Portability.  You're able to take your existing mobile phone number
with you when changing from provider to provider, not to mention having the
person who is calling you pay for the cost of the incoming call -- but
that's surely a discussion for another day….]

Best wishes with your PDA+Phone considerations,

Geoff Goodfellow
[Primarily Retired]
Prague, Czech Republic

Copyright Geoffrey S. Goodfellow 2002, all rights reserved

About the Author

Geoff invented wireless email in the early 80's while at SRI -- the late
Internet protocol czar Jon Postel assigned him "port 99" for his tinkering.
In the late 80’s he founded the second commercial Internet company, Anterior
Technology, as well as founding, RadioMail, the first wireless Internet
business in the early 90's.  In 1998, Geoff relocated to the Czech Republic
and is an owner of the ALCOHOL BAR in the Old Town section of Prague
(http://www.alcoholbar.cz).

Full bio/hubris: http://www.tapsns.com/members-bio/geoff-goodfellow.shtml

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
geoff.goodfellow () iconia com * Prague - CZ * telephone +420 603 706 558
"success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html



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