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Please Hold for Smart Phones

Phones that integrate Internet tools and PCAs are still on the horizon; here's a look at two offerings with less-extensive feature sets.

By David Essex, PCWorld   

The heyday of smart phones--cellular phones that can receive text and data--has been around the corner for a year or more. This summer you may finally see the first blooms on a crop of new, lightweight digital phones that let you manage contacts and schedules, check e-mail, and even browse a scrunched-down version of the Web.

Until then, your choices are limited.

You could try AT&T's PocketNet Service, which displays e-mail messages on your choice of two phones that run a microbrowser from Phone.Com (formerly Unwired Planet), a key player in the smart-phone market.

Or you could attach a wireless modem to your notebook PC or handheld personal digital assistant. But these hybrids can be complicated to set up and awkward to use--a far cry from getting your contacts, to-do lists and e-mail beamed directly into one convenient device.

One Moment, Please

However, the first versions of these futuristic phones are expected to arrive shortly. Smart-phone efforts began to coalesce in March with the release of the widely supported Wireless Application Protocol 1.0. Cell-phone biggies Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, and PDA maker Psion, said their wireless devices would be built around the Java language.

Microsoft, meanwhile, touts Web phones from Acer, Philips Electronics, DaewooTelecom, Nortel Networks, Panasonic, and Vestel, which all sport 640- by 480-pixel screens. These phones run Windows CE, Microsoft's operating system for handhelds, and are also due by year's end.

But 1999 may be more the year of prime hype than prime time, according to Gartner Group research director Bob Egan, who calls the new phones "market experiments." The bottom line is that smart phones won't really get their act together for another year or two.

Besides the AT&T PocketNet and external modem-dependent products, there are only two other U.S.-compatible smart phones currently on the market: the latest upgrade of Nokia's 9000 Communicator and Motorola's brand-new StarTAC Mobile Organizer, the mini-organizer card that attaches to the back of a StarTAC phone. I found that these phones deliver much of what competitors are only talking about.

For StarTAC, Press 1

Fitted with a Mobile Organizer card ($250 with service, or $334.95 to $524.95 without), Motorola's little flip-top StarTAC phone just barely qualifies as smart, with the ability to swap phone numbers, manage contacts, and initiate calls. But StarTAC's superior ergonomic design, portability, and simplicity make this pager-size device practical for daily use.

The Organizer gets ample input from a mix of seven rubberized buttons (reversible for left- or right-handed use with a quick flip of the display) and a monochrome LCD interface that uses well-placed pick lists to replace unnecessary text entry. Like you would in a video game's player-input screens, you have to scroll through the alphabet to select letters. Entering a name and phone number took less than a minute, however. The standard calendar, to-do list, contact manager, and notepad are replete with cross-links and alarms. A PC serial cable and Starfish Software's TrueSync provide data exchange with personal information managers and connected PDAs, but they weren't included in my beta unit.

The StarTAC Mobile Organizer is a good bet if it's the PDA part of smart phones that intrigues you. It puts your cell phone and contact information in one device, which saves you the hassle of carrying a separate PDA for that one purpose.

However, if it's to-dos and calendars that you're really after, StarTAC's device is an awkward alternative to pen-input PDAs like the PalmPilot, which are more powerful and friendly.

For Nokia, Press 2

At $699, Nokia's all-in-one 9000il Communicator is a heavy, brick-size cell phone with a PDA on its back, uniquely integrating contact lists, to-do lists, and calendars with the standard tools of digital communication.

For two days, I used the 9000il to send a fax, browse the Web, send and receive e-mail, make wireless phone calls and control my home-office answering machine.

The "l" stands for light, as in the backlighting that previous models were criticized for lacking. Without the backlight, the phone's display would be barely readable. Outdoors, its wide monochrome LCD is easy on the eyes thanks to plain, bold type. Web pages are another story: Graphics are reduced to cryptic symbols and scrolling through pages is slow and disorienting. Still, it's adequate if you need to read information off Web pages and can't get to a full-size PC screen.

But with its small, shallow keys, the 9000il isn't useful for typing more than telegraph-style messages, though you can use a serial link to import larger files.

Sometimes its hybrid nature is a handicap: The touch tones sent to my answering machine had to be entered on the PDA keyboard, which made for awkward handling as I switched between the open PDA and the ear piece on back.

Also, there are so many communication types that the learning curve for the 9000il is steep, and setup can be a pain. Uploads and downloads take about twice as long as you may be used to.

If you need all your communications tools handy in one place, the 9000il is worth buying. But if you only need a subset of those features--for example voice, e-mail and Web access--I would recommend waiting for one of the more streamlined Web phones that are on their way.