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Piece Provided by TheFeature.com
Wireless-dot-com Guy
By Joachim Bamrud - (courtesy of TheFeature.com - Jul 18 2001) Could you handle it if, for a whole week, your only window
into the rest of the world was the mobile Internet? - It's possible, but trust me: You don't want
to try this at home
Just how easy is it to use the wireless Web?
While much of the focus has been on the
wireless web's usefulness in mobile
situations, we decided to test it out at
home, as an alternative to fixed Internet
access.
My goal: To test the wireless Internet over an extended
period (not just for those limited moments during the course
of the day) and to see how useful it could be as a back-up if
the fixed-line connection was down.
My tools: The Motorola i85s (the first Java-enabled phone
launched in the United States) and the Kyocera QCP-6035
smart phone. US operators Nextel and Sprint PCS provided
wireless web access, respectively.
While I've done quite a bit of surfing on the wireless Internet,
I'd never done it over more than a couple of hours at a time
and always with the option to use the fixed Internet on a
desktop PC in the course of the same day.
Boy, oh, boy, what a difference a week and the wireless
restrictions make.
You gotta have patience, and then some
Even with the patience of an ant climbing Mount Everest,
using the wireless Internet solely and extensively can be
hazardous to your health, mental and physical. I don't know
what tired most or first: my eyes or my fingers or my arms
holding the devices in the best way possible over extended
periods.
While the Kyocera smart phone clearly made reading much
easier since it had a larger screen, I had problems using that
to access my Hotmail e-mail account, which I accessed OK
from the i85s.
Which meant that I had to economize my replies as much as
possible to avoid getting some mysterious ailment afflicting
seriously aggressive phone-writers.
As a result, I "cheated" a little, deliberately waiting to reply
several e-mails that required detailed answers.
There is no doubt that for any extensive writing, you need a
larger keyboard of the type offered by SmartPhones or even
pagers like the Motorola T900.
I honestly don't know how European teenagers manage to
write mile after mile of SMS text messages, but obviously
they had one advantage I didnýt have: SMS lingo, shortening
just about every word. Needless to say, I couldn't count on
my e-mail senders to use the same language (not to mention
that I'm not even fluent myself).
Reading news was considerably easier, even on the
regular-screen i85s, which typically offered six lines of text at
a time. Nextel's wireless Internet portal (using Phone.com's
Internet browser) is pretty extensive, providing just about all
I needed in terms of basic news, including ABC News,
MSNBC, CNET and The New York Times as well as extensive
sources on business and finance and useful links for travel
and shopping.
The equipment
I started out with the i85s the first few days before going
over to the QCP-6035, suspecting the latter would be a
friendlier ally in my test.
I was not proven wrong. While the i85s was sufficient to read
headlines and your typical WAP-formatted, two-sentence
news item, reading extensive articles from CNET or The New
York Times just doesn't make sense on tiny phone screens.
After all, even when the WAP page is longer than two
sentences, how many times do you want to press the "More"
button in a story?
To actually not lose your train of thought (or rather the
author's train of thought), and complete a full paragraph
before any interruption, a smart phone like the QCP-6035 is
essential. It not only provides longer versions of text at a
time, but also a better selection of web sites, since it comes
with web clipping, i.e. accessing regular HTML sites from the
fixed Internet.
Using the phone's Eudora Internet browser, I searched for,
found and bookmarked the regular web sites for CNN, CNET
and The New York Times. One neat advantage: After reading
some particularly good articles I was able to quickly forward
them to friends using the smart phone's built-in touch screen
keyboard and accompanying "toothpick" pointer-writer, which
make writing new and long e-mail addresses easy (unlike
your typical phone, where that almost becomes a nightmare).
But the QCP-6035 also had some downsides. First, it
frequently froze, so even after reading a paragraph, I had to
wait before it let me continue.
Second, sometimes when reading shorter items, I'd have to
reconnect each time I wanted to go to a different news
section (from sports to business, for example). That's
obviously something mobile net users worldwide are used to
and which will only disappear when always-on connections
(like GPRS in Europe) are provided.
Third, since it used web clipping of regular HTML sites that
weren't intended for smaller screens than desktop PCs, I got
some weird-looking sites, which required some maneuvering
before getting to their soul. All those helpful links discreetly
at the left or top of typical Internet sites, were made the key
focus of HTML sites I accessed, forcing me to scroll down a
bit before getting to see the main purpose of my visit:
Articles.
If you're visiting such sites for the first time with such a
device or browser, it can be both confusing and frustrating.
But after that initial first shock, those become relatively small
hurdles.
What even the best wireless Internet devices and programs
can't solve, though, is that the screens - even the largest
ones on PDAs or SmartPhones - are simply much smaller
than desktop or laptop PCs.
Which means that for any extensive usage, today's wireless
devices are just not good enough as sole channels for
information. That should be no surprise to the legions of
disgruntled and disappointed consumers in Europe and the
United States who believed some operators' hype of "the
Internet in your pocket."
But, having been a dedicated wireless Internet user (and
oftentimes WAP defender) during the past 18 months, I was
surprised how much even I became frustrated by the
limitations of the technology.
Which leads me to some conclusions:
The mobile Internet will work as a complete alternative to
the fixed Internet only when devices like laptops come with
the same built-in wireless connections.
The wireless Web through today's devices succeeds to a
certain degree and only for a certain period of time (a few
hours per day, but not a few hours each day for a week).
These devices can, indeed, function as adequate back-up if
the fixed Internet goes down for whatever reason, whether
there are problems with your regular Internet browser or
service provider, or that your PC's batteries went dead just
when you needed to type an urgent e-mail. But it's never
more than second best.
The wireless Internet is a terrific invention and revolutionary
technological breakthrough that is already having a profound
impact on businesses and consumers worldwide. But it's a
technology with a certain set of limitations, just like any other
technology, offering solutions to some but not all of our
problems.
And that's nothing to be ashamed of.
Joachim Bamrud is an award-winning journalist with 17 years
experience as a writer and editor in the United States, Europe
and Latin America. Bamrud has worked for various print,
broadcast and online media, including Latin Trade, Reuters
and UPI. He can be reached at jbamrud@hotmail.com.
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