ComputerLink articles by Brian Pitre

Cell Phones as Internet Appliances

I believe that the first practical Internet appliance will be the cell telephone. Today, we all typically think of accessing the Internet through a computer. Very soon we all will be using even more Internet appliances to access the Internet as it becomes more ubiquitous in our daily lives.

An Internet appliance is usually defined as something less than a personal computer in capability and, in many cases, a device that is application specific. Existing Internet appliances include Web capable cell telephones, palm pilots, automobile navigation systems, or possibly having your kitchen refrigerator interfacing to the Internet.

I have personally been using a new Sprint Web cell telephone for a couple of months now and have found that it is inspiring new ways of thinking about delivering information from the Internet. All of this gets my creative juices flowing. I can now see how new applications that do not require an expensive or sophisticated computer can provide great ways of accessing the Internet. I can just imagine a remote sales person receiving up-to-date pricing information from a company's Web server over the telephone without a computer.

These Web telephones are capable of both push and pull interfaces to the Web. An example of a push interface would be that through Sprint I receive a local weather report every morning on my cell telephone promptly at 7:00 AM. There are a host of other applications available including news, sports, stock information, and so on. Another available application is that a brief email message can be sent to my telephone from anywhere on the Internet to my-telephone-number@sprint.com acting as a great pager system.

An example of a pull interface is, of course, that through the mini-browser interface my Sprint cell telephone can access Yahoo, Amazon, eCompare, Bloomberg, Fox Sports, and CNN. It crudely enables you to receive news, stock prices, and even purchase items through your telephone. One of the people in our office actually ordered a CD from Amazon through their Web telephone. However, their comment was that it was relatively easy due to the fact it was one of the top ten selling CD's and he had already established one button ordering through his own personal information on Amazon through a regular computer and Web browser.

The first application we created internally with our Web telephones was a complete telephone directory application delivered from our Web servers to our Web telephones. This application lists everyone in our company both with their office numbers and cell telephone numbers that can be automatically dialed from the cell phone. The application was quick and easy to develop and is now very useful because is a central repository of information that is kept up to date and distributed to many people within our organization.

The Sprint telephones are programmed through a derivative of HTML known as WML. WML requires specific programming of mini-Web pages for the mini-browser on the cell telephone. The cell telephone industry is also adopting a new definition language called WAP, which states the promise of being both HTML compliant and mini-browser compliant, therefore promising a single Web page environment servicing full scale browsers as well as the mini-browsers. It will be interesting to see if that promise can be delivered.

As good as these telephones and applications may sound the one major drawback is the telephone keypad. Telephones, of course, were designed for entering telephone numbers and it's somewhat cumbersome to enter textual information through a keypad. However, it my belief, and I'm sure many others will agree, that what is destined to occur is the wide deployment and convergence of these telephones with the Palm Pilot. When the pilot technology is added to the cell telephone user interface and Graffiti becomes possible this nuisance will vanish. Although there are cell telephones merging with Palm pilot technology today, I believe the size, weight, and form factor will need improvement before they are widely accepted. However, once that occurs the combination of a cell telephone, a Palm Pilot device and Internet access will be a killer application if there ever was one.

The Yankee Group estimates that there were over 330 million cell telephones sold worldwide in 1999. With that level of adoption it clear that the cell telephone will definitely be the first major Internet appliance to be generally used by the public at large and before long we will not only think of the personal computer as the primary way to access the Internet. So start thinking about deploying your business applications over wireless cell telephones today!