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| I love phones. I admit it. I can remember when I was limited to a single phone and a single phone number. Now I have six phone numbers: home, work, fax, cell, pager, and an 800 number. It’s a good thing I have them all, too. Without all those phones, how would I call the phone companies to straighten out their billing mistakes and to report problems with service? Why, just the other day, I was trying to have a conference call with someone who couldn’t figure out the overly complicated conference-calling feature of his office phone. It was such a relief to be able to talk on our cell phones so I could explain the system to him. To make life even easier, phone companies are now offering me valuable services, as well. Take the awesome new call-blocking service, which stops incoming telemarketing calls “before they ring!” It’s such a timesaver. Now, I don’t have to take calls from commercial establishments to which the phone companies sold my number. I know, I know. You’re thinking, How can the phone companies be any more helpful? How? Web phones. By putting the power of text within an otherwise normal cellular phone, the wireless telephone companies are convinced they’re going to rock your world. Companies are spending gobs of money to advertise the phones, and the prospect of constantly checking stock quotes or the latest jai alai scores from Bhutan may let the phone companies actually sell a few. But let’s think about this a second. Maybe, just maybe, despite the stellar record of the friendly telephone companies, the new phones will be a colossal waste of time and money. The phones cost $500, half the cost of a brand new laptop, even though they lack some rather important features, such as a monitor and a hard drive. I know: The phone companies say you don’t need storage because you can just dial up whatever you need (at 10 cents a minute). The phones’ screens are black and white, apparently because the phone companies find it too expensive to have their $500 devices use the color screen from the $70 Gameboy. The screens display all of 255 characters—teeny, tiny characters. You provide your own magnifying glass. The speed seems to have been miniaturized, too. These babies hum along at 9,600 baud, about a sixth the speed you get with most desktop modems. The transmission speed isn’t even in the same ballpark as the performance you get with a computer that is wired up to a cable modem or Digital Subscriber Line from the phone company. The phone companies say Web phones’ transmission speed will improve, and they’re surely right. Why, I heard of someone who recently used a Web phone to book a plane ticket in less than 15 minutes. Of course, speed won’t be an issue with most Web sites, because you won’t even have access to them. Even your garden-variety Web site has so much information, so many graphics, so much color that they’d overwhelm these little Web phones. So, sites or intermediaries have to strip out just about everything from a site before it can be used by a Web phone. The result, for the foreseeable future, is that Web phones won’t give you access to the Web; they’ll give you access to a handful of services that the phone companies have decided to provide you. Did I mention the keypads? How are you supposed to type on something so small? Some phone companies are just using the standard set of phone keys. So, you’d hit the number 2 if you wanted to type A, B, or C. Software would then guess what word you’re trying to type. Imagine how much fun that will be. Look, I believe as strongly as anyone that just about everything, including phones, will eventually be hooked up to the Web. Just not these phones. Don’t waste your money.
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