Put the world in your pocket: these cellular phones will help you keep your business moving even when you are on the road - seven cellular phones - includes related articles summarizing results and discussing PCS - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, March, 1997 by Douglas Gantenbein

These Cellular Phones Will Help You Keep Your Business Moving Even When You Are on the Road

Even more than a notebook PC, a cellular phone is perhaps your most important ally for conducting business when you're on the road. Not only are you always reachable, but a cell phone in your pocket saves you endless amounts of time by letting you do two crucial things simultaneously: talk and move. And where they might have been considered status items a few years ago, cell phones have become so commonplace that you now face a Byzantine array of choices at affordable prices.

In the first half of 1997, cell phone customers-long accustomed to having just two competing cell phone providers in most major metropolitan areas--will be asked to sort through as many as seven different companies. This increase in competition makes now a great time to consider buying.

There will be new services offered-- such as caller ID, voice messaging, and paging--and claims and counterclaims for service reach and pricing. "Welcome to telecom wars, 1997," says Ken Woo, spokesman for AT&T, a wireless cell phone service provider that was among the first out of the gate with a new system this past fall. "It's going to be a wild and woolly market for consumers."

Somewhere in this thicket lurk some real advantages. The newest generation of telephones, which employ digital technology, offers greater call security, the promise of better call quality, longer battery life (up to 60-plus hours on standby), and a plethora of features that render lugging both a phone and a belt full of pagers a thing of the past.

Digital service is not entirely new. The first generation of these phones came out earlier in the 1990s. But it was a bust, with customers complaining about high phone costs and tinny-sounding, hard-to-hear conversations. Now, service providers and phone manufacturers say they have worked out these bugs, and customers can take advantage of digital's promise. Compared with analog technology, which modulates radio signals to carry voices, digital technology breaks voice signals down into ones and zeroes and transmits these bits. Consumers benefit through more types of service because of the data-handling ability of digital service; service providers benefit because they can fit more calls into a system, reducing the need to erect new cell antennas.

But things can get complicated. For starters, those systems used by the biggest cell phone providers--the ones that traditionally compete in major markets-will likely be offering different services, with each making different claims. These services are based on technologies called TDMA (time division multiple access) and CDMA (code division multiple access). Both convert sound signals to bits and shoot them over the airwaves. TDMA does so by sending small groups of calls over a single channel, similar to allowing three cars at a time onto the interstate. AT&T the largest cell service provider with 6.5 million customers, has lined up behind the TDMA standard.

CDMA, on the other hand, breaks conversations into dozens of pieces that are each electronically tagged. These gab-chunks are sent over multiple channels, then reassembled at the user's phone by decoding the tags. If that all sounds Buck Rogersish, there's a reason. CDMA--developed by Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego--is easily encrypted, and it was originally designed for the military. It's being embraced by AirTouch, Sprint, and Nextel.

Will it matter which one is used? It's too early to tell. CDMA is just now hitting the market after several delays and occasional talk that it was too complicated to work. Its service providers say it will offer better sound quality and greater system capacity, whereas critics contend that its reliability is unproven.

Analog phones, on the other hand, still have voice quality that is as good as or better than the new digital generation, and manufacturers have perfected the technology to the point where analog phones are as compact and trouble-free as possible. By the year 2000, an estimated 35 million analog phones will still be in operation--about half the expected digital market, but still a formidable number.

How We Selected For our review, we picked a range of phones that reflect the features and prices that would appeal to small-business and home-office cellular phone users. We based our picks on whether these phones were industry leaders (Nokia, Motorola), 'new or cutting-edge (Sony), or presented a good combination of features and value (Panasonic, Audiovox).

Phones we hoped to include but couldn't were the new digital model 318 from Ericsson, which did not respond to our requests for a review model, and a new digital/analog dual-mode unit from Sony, the CM-D500, which was not available at press time.

One thing anyone shopping for a cellular phone will find is that pricing seems to make no sense. How can a telephone be free when its retail price is $250? That's because cellular providers pay a bounty to dealers for each phone sold; in the case of lower-priced models, the bounty is enough to cover the retail cost. Free is a misnomer, though--you get that deal only if you agree to a service contract of at least a year with a cell service provider, something that can run $300 and up. How We Tested Our field tests of the phones reflect real-world conditions. We used the phones indoors, outdoors, in a car, walking around--all the places you're apt to take a cell phone. Our judgment was based on call quality, the ability of a phone to make or hold a connection, ease of use, and features.