One observer has called the mobile Internet the most over-hyped technology since 500 channel cable. The concept is simple enough. Find ways for people to connect to the net using wireless devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and wireless phones. That way we could buy books from Amazon while we were waiting in line at the Post Office. We could check out the menus for several local restaurants while standing on a street corner.
Pundits, especially the big accounting/consulting firms jumped on the mobile Internet bandwagon. Most of their "the mobile Internet is ready to take off" predictions were based on what was happening in Europe and Japan.
Media Metrix estimates that something like 7.5 million US households have a device like a wireless phone, or PDA that can handle data from a wireless network. Essentially, that means that they have the ability to get and send email and browse the web. So the capability is there, on the belts and in the pockets of consumers.
But the take-off hasn't happened. How many of those wireless-Internet-capable folks are connecting? No one really seems to know, but a good answer would be "not many." A recent survey conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide estimates that around 9 percent of folks in the US use the wireless Internet.
What seems to be the problem? The biggest one is that the product just isn't very good. Even worse, the whole experience is not very good because just about every component is equally awful.
Start with the display. The two devices most commonly mentioned when we talk about the mobile Internet are wireless phones and PDAs like Palm Pilot. Check out their displays. They're mostly monochrome, with bad resolution. They're hard to read in low light conditions. And they're very, very small. One writer described them as "microbrowsers."
The keyboards are even worse. Palm Pilots don't even have a keyboard in the standard sense, unless you want to lug along one of those keyboard accessories. But that kind of takes away the advantage of having that little browser right there in your pocket, doesn't it?
Wireless phone keypads have their own special brand of difficulty. In addition to having very tiny keys, they don't have a lot of them. Mine has twelve. That means that each key must do multiple duty. And that means multiple keystrokes to produce a single letter or number.
Here's an experiment that you can try at home to see how difficult this can make things. Find someone who's got a phone with web browsing capability. Then go to the Amazon site and try to order a book. You'll find that it takes you between three and five times as many keystrokes, compared to ordering the same book using your PC.
OK, the display and the keyboard are bad. What about the connection? You're right, it's bad, too. Scientific American says that current US wireless networks send data at a rate of about 10 kilobits per second. Those speeds are below good dialup rates and a fraction of the high speed connections that many early adopters have.
Even all of that might be all right if the content were good, but it's not very good either. To begin with, there aren't a lot of sites out there. Fast Web and Transfer, a search engine company, has indexed hundreds of millions of standard web pages, but it can find less than half a million pages configured for the wireless Web.
Key wireless web providers like Sprint and ATT, don't even actually connect you to the web. Instead, what you get is a limited selection of pages stored on closed servers.
The sites that are configured for the mobile net have to be pretty spare in order to work at all. Search capabilities are limited by data transmission speeds. The experience is not good.
These are pretty daunting shortcomings. But there's one more and it's a "biggie." It's price. Surf the mobile Internet today on your wireless phone and you'll pay. Rates of between twenty-five cents and thirty-nine cents a minute are common.
Put all this together and here's what you get. You'll be paying fifteen to twenty-three dollars an hour to reach a limited selection of bad websites using a bad connection and a make-do device, not designed for web browsing.
What folks want is "full web browsing" capability, according to focus group research at Palm, Inc. Right now, the mobile net is a long way from that.
Well, then, is this fixable? Is there a future for the mobile Internet? I think there is. A mobile Internet is the logical extension of two key trends-toward an increasingly wireless world and toward ubiquitous computing and communicating. But that's a long term view. Lots of things have to happen before the mobile net looks good in the short term.
The technology has simply got to be better Voice command would be a big help because it would make the micro-keypads irrelevant. Better phones and PDAs, ones designed to handle lots of data on the go would be helpful, too. Both are on the way. Just don't hold your breath.
There also needs to be agreement on standards. One of the reasons that Japan and Europe seem to always feature in the prediction stories is that they don't have multiple standards. Nordea, the Finnish bank, for example only needs to worry about connecting to a single wireless network, but Bank of America works through three different networks to handle its wireless banking.
We'll need some folks designing web pages with attention to the mobile experience. Extensible Markup Language (XML) can help here with the ability to create once and publish in many forms.
That still leaves two big issues. We've already looked at one. The price has to come down to reasonable levels or the mobile net simply won't have value for a lot of folks.
The other issue is privacy. This hasn't been an issue yet because there haven't been enough folks out there using the mobile net. But the same technology that can alert you that there's a neat special in the restaurant that you're walking by, can also track where you go and what you do. Expect this to become an issue as more folks climb on to the mobile net.
There's one more thing. It's not clear that this is something folks really want. When Gallup conducted a survey of banking customers who owned either a wireless phone or Personal Digital Assistant they found seventy-two percent not interested in using those devices for banking.
Bill Bass, of Land's End, put the issue even more sharply. "It's a zero market for us. If there was any demand, our customers would have told us."
I think we'll have a mobile Internet, and I think the perceptions recorded by Gallup and Land's End's focus groups will change. Just like with PCs and the Net, folks will need to see people they know doing things they'd like to do more easily with this technology than they can do them without it.
That will happen eventually, but I think that the mobile net we'll see will be more likely to be used for alerts and emergencies than for everyday surfing. When all is said and done, even the best technology we can imagine to make the mobile net happen won't be as easy as many alternatives. Like a simple cell phone call, or browsing the web on a PC.
This feature appeared on 6 August 2001
