The Crave. The Prada. The Envy and the Upstage. The Pearl and the Curve. The Krzr, the Razr, the White Chocolate, the Dark Chocolate and the Cherry Chocolate.
And dead ahead this Friday: the iPhone.
The planets are aligned to make this summer the Season of the Cell Phone. Talk isn’t cheap, but it is plentiful. Music and ringtones abound. Internet browsing is abundant. Video is well on the way.
It’s a talker for sure that the cell phone era is just beginning. No longer an accessory, the cell phone-plus — it’s plus a lot of features — is by now practically a required appliance.
The major phone players — Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Nokia — and the service providers (AT&T, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon) all are actively assembling their products for the summer push and the iPhone juggernaut.
[ NEWSDAY ]Feature frustration
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The new Apple iPhone isn’t the only cell phone loaded with doodads.
But do you really use them? Probably not, a recent study suggests. Chalk it up to function fatigue.
Customers worldwide are frustrated with increasingly complex handsets, poorly written manuals, inadequate explanations by salespeople and rising service costs, according to a February survey by a unit of the Chief Marketing Officers Council. Many of the cameras, keyboards, music players and other features in cell phones go unused.
“In many cases, handsets today are overly engineered,” said Brian Regan, the council’s senior vice president in charge of the Global Mobile Mindset Audit.
The biggest complaint among 15,000 customers the council surveyed was that their cell phones had too many functions they didn’t use. About 17 percent of U.S. customers and 16 percent worldwide said the number of features was baffling.
Nearly as many also said the features were difficult to use and the cell phones were hard to customize to their needs. “It shows that manufacturers are still designing devices without a lot of customer input,” Regan said.
[ L.A. TIMES ]COMING TO a CELL NEAR YOU
Future cell phone technologies are coming on fast. Some of the more promising:
TV to go
Video programming for cell phones is expected to increase exponentially in the next five years. Qualcomm’s MediaFlo broadcast TV technology is being employed by Verizon Wireless’ V Cast and AT&T.
The mobile handset will become an extension of TV and computer screens at home, and broadcast content providers such as ABC, Viacom and ESPN are jumping onboard.
Sling Media, maker of the innovative Slingbox, already offers customers using Windows Mobile devices the choice of wirelessly transferring programming from their home TVs to their phones.
Hot spots on the spot
Dual mode (or dual band, or dual radio) cell sets let users roam the world and stay connected to the various transmission systems. In the future, calls will be able to be sent from WiFi hot spots, using a so-called “voice over WiFi” service.
Forget Bluetooth, here’s NFC
It’s all about getting data from here to there, and one choice, already embraced by Nokia, is known as NFC, for “near field communication.” NFC-enabled phones can be used to make instant payments in a store with an NFC reader, or download a photo to a video monitor with a similar reader. Nokia showed off its system earlier this year.
NEW AND FUTURE PHONES
For those of you hotly anticipating the iPhone, skip to the end. Everybody else, consider a couple of alternatives:
Nokia 5700 XpressMusic
For T-Mobile; $200 plus with contract
A very friendly, feature-rich music phone that rounds up all the usual goodies — the music player, a 2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, an expandable memory slot and support for push-to-talk networks — into one savory case that actually twists to switch among the phone’s functions.
The 5700 takes its music seriously. There is a dedicated audio chip for improved performance, and support for several digital music formats including WMA, MP3, AAC and MP4. Built into the device are stereo speakers that actually sound decent at low volume. It also can display album art and those squiggly “visualizations” on its color screen, plus there’s a five-band audio equalizer.
Sony Ericsson K850 Cyber-shot phone
No price set, available this fall
The ultimate camera phone, at least this week. The K850 packs an awesome 5-megapixel sensor, with auto sensor and Xenon flash, all of which pretty much obviate the need for a separate digital camera. The phone keyboard has a dual role; switch to camera mode and illuminated icons indicate which keys act as shortcuts for the digital zoom and other functions.
The phone has a bright 2.2-inch QVGA display and an expansion slot for a Micro SD memory card. Battery talk time is rated at up to nine hours. Choose Luminous Green or Velvet Blue.
Apple iPhone
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For AT&T/Cingular; $499 or $599 with contract, out Friday
The iPhone — “the God machine” — arrives Friday at Apple and AT&T stores with a bulletproof pre-sell and a wanna-have factor that’s never been seen before, not even by Sony’s PlayStation 3. The iPhone crosses all demographics.
The goal for Apple is to push out 10 million phones by the end of 2008, and even that would give Apple only a tiny fraction of the worldwide mobile-device market. Its arrival, however, will signal Apple’s further commitment to the consumer electronics market.
Because the device is software-driven — its elegant form factor is a bonus — a crucial factor in iPhone’s development was addressed earlier this month when Steve Jobs announced that third-party program developers would be welcome to create Web applications for iPhone, as long as they worked through Safari, Apple’s Internet browser.
The iPhone has only one button. Users swipe their fingers — not keys or a stylus — to select items onscreen. Besides using the Mac OS system and its Safari Web browser, iPhone adjusts its brightness according to ambient light and turns off its display when a call comes in. And it is, in Jobs’ words, “the best iPod ever.”