Rick Nelson

3G weapons, flashlights, and watches
June 29, 2007

Apart from making phone calls, what do you use your cell phone for the most? The Wall Street Journal put that question to its readers in multiple-choice format Wednesday. Here are the unscientific results (as of this morning): playing games, 2%; surfing the Web, 5%; taking pictures, 4%; texting or e-mailing, 41%; something else, 9%; or nothing else, 39%.

Although it wasn't an explicit choice, one commenter said he used his phone as mostly as a $40 per month time-telling service—that is, a wristwatch replacement. In fact several people said their phones serve as replacements for watches or alarm clocks. Others said they used their phones as calendars, contact lists, note takers, navigators, step counters (pedometers?), music players; pocket warmers (must be old power-hungry models); flashlights, calculators, weapons, PowerPoint reviewers, checkbook balancers, stock-portfolio managers, and vanity toys that impress other people.

The fact that few respondents claimed to use their phones for Web surfing may be due to the relatively poor performance of cell phones as Web-surfing devices. The drawbacks include their small screen size as well as relatively low data rates supported by cellular carriers. I’ve used Web-enabled phones for several years and have found that they are effective only for a small number of mobile-friendly sites. (For example, I can read most of the daily paper at mobile.boston.com while riding my chauffeured limousine a rattletrap shuttle bus to work.)

Maybe the iPhone, going on sale today, will offer a vastly improved Web-surfing experience, but I will not be an early adopter. The iPhone’s screen may be an improvement over my SDA’s screen, but the AT&T network the iPhone will operate on has been roundly criticized.

A related article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal discusses a way to alleviate data-transmission bottlenecks in cellular networks, like AT&Ts, citing a “new trend: running cell phones on Wi-Fi.” The article says carriers are getting over their view of Wi-Fi as a competitor. Carriers, it says, are “starting to warm to the technology, seeing it as a complement, not a substitute, to their networks. They think Wi-Fi can help them ease network congestion as mobile media applications like video hog more of their expensive bandwidth.”

In fact, Steve Jobs and AT&T chief executive Randall L. Stephenson are defending the deployment of the iPhone on AT&T’s EDGE network in part because the iPhone can fall back on its Wi-Fi capability for heavy broadband lifting, as reported in today’s Times. In fact, in their iPhone review, the WSJ’s Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret state, “When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web.”

But Wi-Fi for cell phones has its own problems. I’ve used a Wi-Fi-enabled phone for about a year and a half (so much for the new trend the WSJ spotted this week), but I rarely use the Wi-Fi feature. I generally find that if I’m in a Wi-Fi hotspot, I can conveniently pull out my laptop.

For true mobility, WiMAX may ultimately be the better backup for cellular networks, no matter what 3G LTE proponents say.

Posted by Rick Nelson on June 29, 2007 | Comments (2)