"Rogers AT&T, a national PCS carrier in Canada, and Ericsson, the Swedish telecom "manufacturer, recently demonstrated the first multimedia international 3G telephone call using EDGE, the network technology GSM and TDMA PCS carriers will deploy to upgrade to the international 3G standard."
- ISP Planet, from an article on 3G Mobile Wireless technologies
Introduction
As noted in our PC Prognostications for 2000, companies that get Web-on-cellphones technology and wireless TCP/IP communications right will emerge as the leaders, as third-generation ("3G") wireless communications devices start to hit the market in the next six months. It is clear that wireless devices already represent a major growth area in the portable computing, telephony, handheld and networking markets, as the R&D and investment efforts of leading companies in these areas show.
Too bad North Americans will be among the last to benefit from the wireless connectivity speeds of 3G device -- already delivering up to 2.2Mbps in limited trials. However, as detailed in an article entitled 3G Mobile - A Distant Future, 3G experts admit that although 3G promises upwards of 4Mbps, consumers will more likely get about 144Kbps each, which will not do for full-motion video.
Handhelds
As noted in our report on Pocket PCs, Microsoft has built a fairly robust web browser into its Windows CE operating system, and a growing number of wireless solutions are already available for that platform, as products from Compaq, HP, Casio and others all share a common "CompactFlash" expansion card format, helping to spur support from wireless hardware card vendors. Microsoft, at PC Expo on June 27th, announced a deal with Aether Systems that will deliver everything needed to get up and running with a wireless Pocket PC -- device, modem and service -- for US$39.99 a month.
Initially, Aether’s wireless Enterprise ISP service will use the Compaq iPaq Pocket PC and the Sierra Wireless AirCard 300. The US$39.99 monthly price of the Enterprise ISP service for Pocket PCs will include unlimited usage and access to e-mail and the customer’s choice of Web content. Availability of this new service -- which Microsoft says is will be targeted to large-volume enterprise customers for their own corporate and customer deployment -- is expected in the third quarter of this year.
Meanwhile market leader Palm announced its intention to (finally!) provide expansion facilities on future Palm models and says it will, before the end of the year, offer wireless connectivity options across its entire product line (a bit of an exaggeration, as seen below!) via a US$50 software upgrade it calls the Mobile Internet Kit. This kit will require and include Palm OS 3.5 and thus will not work on Palms that are not firmware upgradeable, such as the IIIe and PalmPilot 1000 and 5000 models. Additionally, PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Pro owners must have installed the now-discontinued 2MB expansion memory upgrade to be able to use the kit. Downplaying these compatibility snags, the company says the Mobile Internet Kit will allow "nearly all" of the 7 million Palm owners to access the Web Clipping service previously usable only by owners of the Palm VII.
Palm says its Mobile Internet Kit will connect to the Internet in one of four ways: via a cell phone, through an infrared or cable connection, via a wireless modem or via a dial-up modem. At PC Expo, the company shows a pre-release version of the software running on a Palm V, connected to a Qualcomm PCS phone.
Also at PC Expo, Sony unveiled its Palm OS-based handheld computer, with expansion facilities based on its own "memory stick" design. And Palm OS licensee Handspring, which announced that it now has a 25 percent market share, says it is sticking with its own proprietary expansion format.
Although is is troubling that each of these Palm OS vendors has its own unique (and incompatible) expansion card format, these expansion facilities, coupled with software innovations that can help adapt web pages to their diminutive screens, should lead to the development of both wired and wireless networking add-ons, solving many of the problems that limited the usefulness of first-and second-generation Palm OS-based systems.
Thus, we're keeping an eye on the Yahoo-owned Online Anywhere, WML developers AvantGo, Digital Paths LLC, OmniSky, Riverbed, Spyglass and Wysdom Inc., and hardware developers Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Palm, and, yes, Microsoft.
AvantGo
AvantGo's Web Markup Language (WML) technology adapts web pages for mobile use on mini-browsers for Windows CE, Palm OS and -- soon -- various Web-enabled phones. During our tests, we were particularly impressed with the functionality of AvantGo.com's free service for Windows CE and Palm OS compatibles. With it, you can download up to 2 MB of data from one or more Website to your desktop PC and transfer it, in a highly efficient compressed format, to your handheld device. From there, you use the supplied AvantGo minibrowser on the Palm or the built-in Pocket Internet Explorer on the Windows CE devices to navigate the pages offline, complete with graphics, links, and basic HTML formatting. In other words, you don't need an internet connection on your handheld unit to access Web pages!
Foe example, let's say you want to browse PC Buyer's Guide on your Palm IIIc or Pocket PC. After signing up for AvantGo's service and downloading the client for your handheld platform, you'd point the AvantGo Create Custom Channel Wizard at http://thetechnozone.com, with a maximum channel size of 2000K and a link depth of 2 or 3 (this defines how many levels "deep" it will follow links from page to page). Then, when the selected Web pages have been transferred to your handheld unit, click on the first link ("What's New"). This will take you to the PC Buyer's Guide home page. Or, if you prefer, you can access all the other areas of this site directly from that page.
In our tests, the pages here at PC Buyer's Guide translated well to both the Palm OS and Pocket PC platforms, however, the Palm's lower resolution (120x120) display generated by AvantGo's minibrowser was less graphically rich than that displayed by Pocket Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC. AvantGo's display lacked coloured tables (in fact, it seems to lack support for tables entirely!), coloured fonts and several other features supported by Pocket Internet Explorer. Still, for taking information from a web site or Intranet with you, it's a great solution.
For more information, see part 2 of our wireless networking feature.
For Further Reading:
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