Wireless Summer

By ADAM COHEN

As Bill Maggs slides behind the wheel of his Audi S4, his Palm is at work answering the critical question of the morning: Route 280 or 101? The PDA's wireless Etak Traffic Touch function surveys competing routes from his San Francisco home to his Silicon Valley office and beams down constantly updated reports on which one is less clogged. En route, Maggs is a flurry of wireless connectivity. He chats on his Motorola cell phone and answers e-mail on his Internet-enabled Palm. If he likes a song he hears on the radio, he can order it on Amazon with a few taps of his stylus. And if he decides he'll stop off at an Internet start-up in San Francisco's SoMa (South of Market) district, he doesn't need a map. His car, equipped with a global-positioning-system (GPS) receiver on its dashboard, gives him spoken, block-by-block directions.

Maggs, 37, is admittedly a bit of a geek. He's chief technology officer at Palm, Inc. But the amazing thing is that the hyperwireless Maggs isn't that many months ahead of the rest of us. Experts have been saying for years that one day we'll all be checking e-mail and placing buy orders on Intel while we lie on the beach--or drive down California's busy Route 101. And with a new generation of smart cellular phones and sophisticated wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) flooding the stores this summer, each offering a dazzling array of new services, the wireless revolution has finally arrived. In this revolution, blood won't be running in the streets (if we keep our eyes on the road!), but applications like instant messaging and e-trades will be.

How big is wireless? Just ask Wall Street. Companies seen as harnessing its power have soared to astronomical valuations. Qualcomm, a leader in the digital wireless space, has watched its stock soar nearly 3000% in little more than a year. Finnish cell-phone maker Nokia, which was floundering in the early 1990s, has ridden the wireless juggernaut to become the eighth most valuable company on the planet (see accompanying story). Palm Inc. and AT&T's wireless tracking stocks were two of the most anticipated IPOs this year.

While this investment frenzy has chilled a little of late, what has driven it is a simple realization: we're on the brink of a major technosocial upheaval that's right up there with the steam engine, car, TV and computer. It promises the ultimate technological breakthrough for the information age. Virtually all information will be available to you at all times, whether you're taking a day off from work, visiting the in-laws or traveling to Fiji. With the importance of physical location diminished, even irrelevant, you'll be able to answer an e-mail from your boss, shift your 401(k) or sing your child a video-and-sound lullaby wherever you are.

The implications are so sweeping that they have smart people talking in ways that seem to be ripped from the pages of Isaac Asimov. Sun Microsystems' chief scientist, Bill Joy, recently said that in the future, virtually all inanimate objects--from front doors to light bulbs--will have a wireless Internet hookup. What does that mean for you? One day, when your dishwasher breaks down, the appliance will alert you via your cell phone or PDA. It may even call the repairman.

That day is still a way off, at least in the U.S. America introduced the world to handheld wireless when it outfitted GIs with walkie-talkies during World War II. But in the years since, the country has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world. The main reason we're lagging is that in the early 1990s Europe and Asia adopted a common digital standard called Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) that lets overseas cell-phone users call seamlessly among 120 countries, from Sweden to Singapore. The U.S., by contrast, had several competing standards--slowing adoption of wireless technology and adding to the cost. America has also been held back by its telephonic success. Our land-line phones are so good that we've had much less incentive than other countries to switch to wireless.

But there's no question Americans are eagerly cutting the cord. Cell-phone use in the U.S. started slow. As recently as 1990 there were only 5 million wireless subscribers. Now 90 million Americans have cell phones, and by 2003 the number is likely to approach 140 million. Virtually all phones being made today have microbrowser capability, enabling them to surf the Web. PDA sales are exploding; they're projected to rise from 8.9 million last year to 35 million in 2003. That's largely due to a flurry of new devices from Casio, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, as well as newcomers Handspring and Research in Motion. And others will surely leap in too, among them electronics giant Sony.

All the new handhelds either have or will soon have wireless capability. The Palm VII has a built-in antenna. Flip it up, and you have Internet access. By the end of the year, Palm promises add-ons that will let all its earlier models hook up too. The implications are striking. By 2002, says International Data Corp., the number of people connecting to the Internet wirelessly will surpass the number hooking up through PCs.

What are all these folks doing with their wireless connections? Getting the Net wirelessly means having access to all the things that come with it--e-mail and instant messaging, news from the New York Times or ABC, detailed driving directions from MapQuest, even remote access to eBay auctions. And little doesn't mean less. Cell phones rely on a software standard called Wireless Application Protocol, which custom fits Web content onto those cramped little displays. Palm Inc., for its part, uses its own Web "clipping" technology to pull information onto its PDAs.

Then there are the specialized applications. Doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles take Palms on their rounds and have instantaneous access to patients' charts and lab results. Electronic Data Systems has a program that lets you do your banking from your backyard hammock. If you need to communicate with a deaf person, SignIt! will walk you through sign language. MSN Mobile alerts you through your PDA about important events that you preselect--e-mail from your boss, say, or when a stock drops below 60 and you want to be reminded to buy it.

Not all wireless relies on the Internet. For close communications, many handhelds, including budget models for kids, have infrared sensors that let one unit interface with another nearby. Executives can use it to beam their business cards from their device to someone else's. And it's the technology behind that romantic Palm commercial in which two beautiful strangers, spying each other from different trains as one pulls away, manage to communicate: she sends him her phone number before they're whisked apart. (Yes, you can really do it if both Palms are on and you're close enough together.)

The industry is also banking heavily on another form of wireless--short-range-radio technology, the basis for its new Bluetooth protocol (named for a 10th century king who unified Denmark). Bluetooth, whose first stages will be rolled out this summer by a consortium of industry titans including Nokia, Ericsson, IBM and 3Com, will eventually let all your devices talk to each other and work together. Click on a name in your Bluetooth-enabled PDA, and it will find your cell phone (even if it's still in your briefcase) and place the call. If you have a Bluetooth-enabled earphone, you won't even need to touch your phone. The goal is to link all devices, from laptops to home thermostats. Then you should be able to check your e-mail and warm up the house as you walk in the front door just by tapping a few buttons.

You bet there's a lot going on. But what the wireless industry really wants to know is this: What services will make you feel that despite the cost and complexity--and the new connections your brain will have to make to operate all these devices--you can't live without wireless? Right now, the industry is counting on two key features to reel you in: customization and localization.

The difference between a radio or TV broadcast and a wireless Internet connection is that everything that comes in over a PDA or cell phone can be customized specially for you. "It's about connectivity to our own information, whatever is important to us," says Andrew Seybold, editor of Andrew Seybold's Outlook, a wireless data and mobile computing industry newsletter. You get your e-mail, your instant messages, your stock portfolio. You can use a travel application to find out if your plane is on time and what gate it's leaving from.

But it gets better. A service called Surveyor pulls live video-camera images from the Web and puts them on a Palm. Right now it's showing two live Web-cam images--the Tokyo skyline and the Empire State Building. Not too exciting. But suppose it calls up a live picture of your daughter's preschool classroom? Or the home-security camera in your backyard while you are on vacation? It's only a matter of time.

Localization is the ability of a hand-held wireless to give you info geared specifically to where you happen to be. Some handhelds can do it now--by GPS or other technologies--but many more will be able to do it soon. Prompted by emergency-response concerns, the FCC is requiring all cellular carriers by late next year to be able to locate all their subscribers within 400 ft.

Thanks to localization, PDAs can give you directions linked to where you are at any given time. Overlay a map of the Grand Canyon, and it can tell you which path to take to get out. Not surprisingly, many of the localization services revolve around mobile commerce, which the industry has dubbed m-commerce. Your handheld, or for that matter your cell phone, can point you to the nearest Starbucks or Chinese restaurant. When you're lost on the road, it can lead you to the closest gas station.

Retailers, in particular, are salivating at the possibilities. When you walk through a shopping mall in the future, stores will be able to beam messages tailored just for you: the lawn mower you were asking about last weekend has come in; the casual pants you always buy are 40% off today.

To hear the industry talk, the future of m-commerce is virtually unlimited. PDAs and cell phones could one day replace wallets and money. Europeans are already using cell phones to make purchases from vending machines (the cost of the cigarettes or candy bar is automatically added to your account). That might come to America soon, but the industry is setting its sights even higher. Palm wants you eventually to store your credit-card numbers on your PDA and use it to make major purchases. It's working on a variety of techniques--including digital signatures and fingerprints--to establish that the person making the purchase is really you.

So what should you buy? The current array of devices--cell phones, PDAs, beepers and more--bewilders even the experts. "Every few months there's a slew of new products that have more features, perform better and are priced lower," marvels Ira Brodsky, an analyst with Datacomm Research. But you've already got plenty of choices. A cell phone is a good bet if most of your wireless connectivity is going to be done by voice. These "smart phones" have the added advantage of being less expensive than a PDA. It's not hard to find a cellular service that will give you the phone for free. The downside: there's not a lot of room on a cell-phone screen for browsing the Internet. But count on screens--and phones--to get bigger. Remember that Ur-1990s one-upmanship over who has the smallest cellular phone? It's over.

PDAs, with their larger screens, are a better bet for Web surfing. But they're expensive. A Palm VII costs $449, plus the monthly fee you pay for any wireless service. And they're not much use when you need to make a phone call. One-way pagers seem pretty antiquated these days, but two-way pagers with Web access can be a less expensive and highly portable way to access discrete bits of information. You can already use them to send and receive e-mail, buy the new Toni Braxton CD on Amazon.com ditch your Microsoft stock and get directions to the nearest cinema or sushi den.

And there are still more options: instant-messaging devices designed for kids, such as Tiger's Lightning Mail; the Apple AirPort, a flying-saucer shaped device that lets multiple Mac users at a single location all access the Internet wirelessly; and Microsoft's new Web-ready Pocket PC.

How to choose from among this wealth of options? It's best to think hard about which functions are most important to you--and which aren't. "It has to be driven by your needs," says Dan Coole, a market developer with cell-phone maker Ericsson. "How many things do you want to carry? Do you need a keyboard? There's going to be a lot of personal preference involved."

The big device debate right now is over convergence: Will single-purpose machines prevail, or will new appliances emerge with multiple functions? It's a high-tech version of Lamarckian evolution, in which new characteristics are acquired through demand. You can expect cell phones to sprout color monitors so they can be used to surf the Web, and PDAs to develop telephonic capability. When the convergence is complete, the theory goes, we'll have a single device combining in one small, supersmart package the qualities of a PDA, cell phone and pager--allowing you to schedule, e-mail, call, beep and surf without missing a beep. That could happen, but don't count on it. Skeptics say the result would be neither fish nor fowl--awkward as a PDA and awkward as a phone. For now, it's probably best to choose a device based on what your primary need is. (After all, you still have a separate telephone, TV and VCR at home.) If you want voice, get a phone. If you want data, get a wireless PDA. If you want to take calls on your own schedule, settle for a pager.

The wireless revolution is something no major tech company wants to miss. There are face-offs at every level. Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson are duking it out over smart phones. Microsoft's Pocket PC is squaring off against Palm, which has nearly 70% of the handheld market. AT&T, SPRINT PCS, MCI and the Baby Bells want to provide the connections. CNN, ESPN and everyone else want to provide the "news nuggets" and other customized content.

Two of these battles are particularly high stakes. In one, AOL, Yahoo, Excite@Home and others are fighting to become the dominant "mobile portal"--the first screen that wireless Internet users land on. The winner has the potential to be the Yahoo of the wireless age once the number of people connecting to the Internet wirelessly exceeds the number connecting through wires.

In the other battle, Microsoft is working to establish its new Pocket PC operating system as the standard for wireless, though it has a long way to go to catch up with Palm's dominant OS--the Windows of the handheld world. Early evaluations of Microsoft's Pocket PC say it's good but not likely to be the "Palm killer" some were expecting. There's also a joint venture of the software firm Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Japan's Matsushita and Motorola called Symbian that was designed to keep Microsoft at bay. Although there have been some cracks in the alliance--Ericsson has said it will put a Microsoft browser in its phones--Symbian will probably remain a counterweight to Gates & Co. Also crimping Microsoft's plans: AOL, whose newly released Netscape 6.0 browser may be adapted for wireless handhelds.

Wireless skeptics--and there are quite a few--say reports of the revolution are greatly exaggerated. "Promises, promises, promises," says Jane Zweig, an analyst with Herschel Shosteck Associates. "A lot of hype, not much delivery."

The naysayers claim there's far more work to be done building the wireless infrastructure. Wireless Palm, for example, still works mainly in big cities. And how many times have you found yourself out of range with your cellular phone? As for the handheld Internet experience, it isn't all that great. How good will the Web look on a cell phone's tiny screen or even a PDA's slightly larger one? And then there's speed. If you didn't like the World Wide Wait on your home PC's 56K modem, how will you like it on a 19.2K wireless connection, the current PDA maximum?

The wireless industry insists progress is being made on all fronts. Service and screens are improving, it says. And wireless broadband is coming. Metricom, a company providing wireless modem connections to users in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, will be rolling out high-speed wireless by the end of the year. It is expected to take service to 120K or higher. And the industry says mobile 384K wireless (as fast as a high-speed DSL connection) should be available by 2003.

There's a second group of critics who worry not that wireless won't live up to its promises but that it will. "Is it a major problem in our society that people walking down the street don't have Internet access?" asks Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and gadfly author (High Tech Heretic). "None of my friends are going around saying, 'Oh, my God, I don't have enough information.' Quite the opposite. People are saying, 'I'm flooded with this stuff!'"

And, they say, all this communication isn't bringing people together; it's pulling them apart. Go to the mall, and you'll see strolling couples--one partner yammering on a cell phone, the other feeling ignored. Go on vacation, and you'll see kids fending for themselves while their parents are running mini-offices from their beach blanket. My boss complains he doesn't have weekends free anymore. He tries to get away--taking his daughter, for example, on a Sunday romp in a park--but while she runs in the fields, he's busy checking e-mail on his pager and conducting business by cell phone.

Still, wireless technology is getting hard to live without. When this story was edited, I was on a boat cruising down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. I was able to read and answer my editor's e-mail on my laptop (thanks to a wireless modem) and answer questions by cell phone. The work got done, but I missed a pretty good fish fry. --With reporting by David S. Jackson/Los Angeles and Anita Hamilton and Unmesh Kher/New York [BOX]

SMART PHONES

ERICSSON R380 Under $1,000; available in fall You can make calls in more than 100 countries, then flip it open for a PDA with Web access and voice recognition

MOTOROLA V2282 $99 to $199 (depending on carrier), plus $14 for covers No ordinary cell phone, it has a built-in FM radio and offers a pick of colored shells

ERICSSON CHATBOARD $50; available in June Snap this mini-keyboard onto your cell phone (the T18Z is shown here), and type instant messages to friends

KYOCERA QCP2000 $99 to $149; available in Sept. Kyocera, which bought Qualcomm's handset unit last fall, plans to introduce cheap eye catchers like this

MOTOROLA V8160 $399; available in June An upgrade of the analog model out last year, this digital version will sport a microbrowser for the Web

NOKIA 8260 $250; available in Sept. With a hidden antenna, compact styling, e-mail and instant-messaging capability, the 8260 looks like a winner

SAMSUNG SCH-6100 $180 Weighing in at just 3.1 oz., this champagne-colored beauty features Net access and voice-activated dialing

IN YOUR PALMS

PALM VII $450, plus $10 to $45 a month for e-mail and Web access This version of the best-selling handheld computer comes with a wireless modem that lets you send e-mail and tap into the Web

HANDSPRING VISOR $249 (deluxe model) This low-cost handheld uses Palm's operating system and comes with add-ons like the Geode GPS unit shown here

RIM 957 HANDHELD $499, plus $40 a month Newcomer RIM takes on the handheld market with this compact organizer. A Web browser is coming this fall

COMPAQ IPAQ H3650 $499 or $799, plus $30 a month (with modem); available in June Look out, Palm! Here's a silvery, sleek pocket PC with a built-in MP3 player, full Web access and a gorgeous color screen

PAGE ME

RIM BLACKBERRY $399, plus $40 a month You can send and receive e-mail, make stock trades and check news, weather and sports on this neat device

MOTOROLA P935 $399, plus about $25 a month; available in June You can send instant messages to friends, chart your stocks or play games

FOR THE KIDS

MOTOROLA T900 $200, plus a monthly fee; available in July Made just for teens, the T900 enables chums to do wireless e-mail and instant messaging

CYBIKO $150 This snazzy little handheld lets kids chat, play games and schedule all those pressing slumber parties

TIGER QUIK WRITER $33; available in fall Kids use a stylus to send handwritten messages to friends up to 50 ft. away. It even works through walls

GIRL TECH LASER CHAT $15 Who says wireless has to cost a lot? Girls can beam brief voicecasts to one another up to 35 ft. apart

TOY BIZ VMAIL $20 Kids record a voice message, encrypt it with a secret code, then send it to a friend using the built-in radio technology

OTHERS

SIERRA WIRELESS AIRCARD 300 $400, plus $20 to $55 a month Pop this 19.2-Kbps modem into any Windows notebook for untethered Net surfing

METRICOM RICOCHET $220, plus $60 to $100 a month; available in August Cruising at 128 Kbps, the Ricochet network will turbo-charge the wireless Web