Cell phones: An evolution from talk to text and more

Bob Barnett's phone call launched a nearly $150-billion-a-year industry.

Twenty-five years ago this past Monday, during a media event at Chicago's Soldier Field, the president of Ameritech Mobile Communications made the nation's first commercial cell-phone connection. He rang up Alexander Graham Bell's grandson on a Motorola DynaTAC handset that weighed 21/2; pounds and retailed for $3,995.

The industry has changed dramatically in the quarter-century since. Through a series of mergers, Ameritech was absorbed into what are now the nation's largest carriers, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless. Cell phones are mainstream devices, owned by more than 80 percent of Americans, that can fit in a back pocket. And their primary use isn't talking anymore. In the second quarter of this year, Americans sent more text messages on cell phones than they made calls.

That ubiquity is creating a challenge for the industry: how to keep growing when nearly everyone who wants a cell phone has one and the price of service plans is steadily declining. Carriers are pushing more e-mail and Internet services, giving handset makers more leeway to create multiuse devices such as the iPhone and upgrading their networks to handle all the traffic.

"The amount of money they get from voice is shrinking," Forrester Research principal analyst Charles Golvin said. "What they've been trying to do for quite a while is balance that loss in revenue with other kinds of applications."

The first commercial cell-phone call in the Los Angeles area, in June 1984, was nearly foiled by a dead car battery.

Mitch Mohr, founder of Los Angeles-based cell-phone distributor Celluphone, was responsible for helping then-Mayor Tom Bradley call a runner carrying the Olympic torch to the city. The phone had been installed in a stretch limo, but someone left a door open after a party the night before, and the car battery ran out of juice. Luckily, Mohr had installed another phone in a red Mustang, so he called the phone from there and handed it to the mayor to complete the call.

"It was perfectly clear," Mohr recalled.

Few people had even heard the word "cellular" when Mohr started Celluphone in 1983 — he had to drive to the San Diego library and look up the word in the card catalog. But only a few years later, customers were shelling out $2,500 for phones that Mohr would install in their cars. His company is still in business.

Prices fell as carriers competed for customers and as technology enabled smaller handsets that people could more easily carry around.

"The thing that really made all this possible was semiconductors," said Rudy Krolopp, one of the designers on the DynaTAC 8000X, the phone used to make the first commercial call in 1983. As chips followed the phenomenon known as Moore's Law, becoming smaller and more powerful, designers could fit additional features on increasingly tiny phones.

Adoption started surging about 1998, when AT&T changed its pricing plan so that long-distance, local and roaming calls all counted toward customers' monthly minutes, making cell-phone pricing much easier to understand.

By 2000, 40 percent of consumers had cell phones, said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at research company Nielsen IAG. But digital technologies that allowed better call quality and lower prices have doubled adoption.

Now that cell phones are nearly ubiquitous, carriers face a new challenge: how to handle the increasing number of people using their networks to make phone calls, send text messages, surf the Web and check e-mail.

"They're running out of capacity," said Kenneth Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Text messaging already has surpassed voice calls as more cell-phone owners become comfortable with tapping out short notes rather than calling someone. In the second quarter of 2008, the typical subscriber sent or received 357 text messages, compared with 204 phone calls, according to Nielsen Mobile.

That's a boon for carriers, which generally make a lot more money from text messages than they do from voice calls. It's much less expensive for them to transmit text messages, which come in smaller packets of data.

The mobile Web is next, and companies are jostling to provide the technology and applications used by consumers. About 11 percent of North American adults use the Internet on their cell phones at least once a month, and an additional 6 percent do it less frequently, according to Forrester.

"The Internet is trying like heck to come to your cell phone," said John Jackson, an analyst at Yankee Group. "Everyone wants to control the experience."

The Internet allows phone users to search for nearby restaurants, gas stations, friends and products. It provides directions and sends coupons for nearby restaurants.

Soon, it will do all of this even faster. Carriers already spend about $20 billion a year improving their networks, but a major switch to networks built specifically to accommodate Internet services and applications won't be completed until 2011, Forrester's Golvin said.

Until then, carriers have to walk a fine line: They want customers to use the mobile Internet, but not so frequently that the data volume overwhelms the networks and worsens the quality of voice calls.

Once the faster networks are in place, consumers will be able to take better advantage of phones that double as digital media players and Web-surfing gadgets. Next-generation handsets will allow users to talk to family and friends while watching video of them at the same time, take photographs in higher resolution and browse the Internet faster than computers with DSL connections can today.

They'll be barely recognizable to those that made some of the first phones. But there is one constant: what a phone says about its owner.

In a recent study by research company Harris Interactive, teens said that, with the exception of clothing, cell phones tell the most about social status or popularity.

That's not much different from the way it was 25 years ago, said Steve Largent, president of CTIA — the Wireless Association. Then, he played football for the Seattle Seahawks and received a DynaTAC in exchange for appearing in ads for the phone.

"I had it for the coolness factor," he said. "It was a status symbol."

Man killed for cell phone

KARACHI: Mobile phone snatchers killed a citizen on Thursday within the jurisdiction of Shahrah-e-Noor Jehan PS.

According to the police and Edhi sources, two armed men tried to snatch cellular phone from Syed Masood Alam, and shot him dead when he resisted and fled away. The deceased was a shuttering contractor and a resident of sector 7-D-1, North Karachi. Edhi volunteers shifted his body to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for autopsy. The body of Ziauddin, 52, son of Alauddin was found near the Sea View Terminal Apartments, said the Edhi sources. Unidentified assailants killed Nasir, a cable operator, in sector 9-E, Orangi Town.

Cell phone responsibility starts with the parent

The case of the teenage girl from Pinckney High School who took revealing photos of herself on a cell phone and sent them to friends -- who soon shared them with their friends -- has brought a new urgency to the dilemma faced by parents who want to give their kids access to technology but at the same time, protect them from their own impulsiveness and irresponsibility.
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For the dilemma is this: The kids know technology a whole lot better than the parents.

Let me be even more to the point with some tech columnist preaching: If you're going to give your kids technology, you need to know what they're doing with it. Which means you have to take the time to learn it yourself, before unleashing it for your kids.

I hear from parents all the time how good their kids are with computers, the Internet and cell phones. "My kid can actually text without even looking at the keyboard," one parent of a 13-year-old recently told me.

"What is he texting?" I asked.

"Beats me," said the parent. "Kid stuff."

There's the problem. Just what is "kid stuff" these days? I am stunned at what I see on the MySpace pages of many kids. Obviously, parents haven't gone there. Racy photos. Gutter language. Cyber bullying. These things are all over those social networking sites on the pages of kids barely in their teens.

It's so easy for the Luddites to blame the technology. I blame the parents. If you give your kid a tool, teach them how to use it and make sure they use it correctly. That means you have to check up on them.

"But I don't want to spy on my child," say some. Nonsense. That's your job. You're supposed to know who their friends are, how they're behaving, where they're going. And in cyberspace and hooked up to cell phones, there are a lot of dark and scary neighborhoods that can land your kids in a heap of trouble.

So, first step is, if you give a kid a cell phone, know what it can do and how they will be -- and are -- using it.

Most of the phone companies have usage filters that give parents the ability to better manage and control how their children use their phones. Verizon Wireless, for example, has a $4.99-a-month service that can:
• Set thresholds for voice minutes;
• Set specific limits for text, picture, IM and video messaging as part of pay-as-you-go or message bundle plans;
• Set time-of-day restrictions for data use and messaging;
• Create lists of "trusted" and "blocked" numbers; and
• Employ content filters.

"If a parent wanted to prevent a child from taking and sending explicit photos on their phone and receiving the same, they could block specific numbers from sending or receiving picture messages," says Michelle Gilbert, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless. "A parent could also block the time of day the child is messaging, and of course, limit the number of messages."

Sprint-Nextel has a similarly priced service. On Sprint Samsung and Sanyo phones, parents can set up and use a lock code to limit access to certain features like data services and the phone's camera/pictures. "This would limit access to sending or receiving any data on the device, so the user would be unable to send or receive a PictureMail," says Mark Elliott, a Sprint spokesman. "The phone's camera/video recorder could be locked to limit the ability to taking pictures or videos with the phone."

Elliott says a Sprint customer can make an appointment to meet with a Sprint representative to receive free training on the features available to them and how to use the different parental controls.

Those features and services are great, as far as they go.

But the real issue is parenting responsibility. A mobile phone is a privilege. It is incredibly powerful. It can be incredibly intrusive and disruptive.

Do pre-teen and early teen kids really need these full-featured cell phones? If your child must have a mobile for safety reasons and emergency communications, there are bare-bones phones made just for kids that don't have all the messaging and photo features and can be programmed by parents to make and receive calls only from a few numbers.

But if you are handing your child a phone that surfs the Internet, watches videos, plays music, takes stills and videos, and can send instant messages and text blasts to anyone, anywhere, you have given them a key to places that they shouldn't be allowed to go.

So you'd better know what keys they are using.

Kids, because they are immature, are by nature going to be impulsive and irresponsible.

You, Mom and Dad, have no such excuse.

Slow Down? What Slow Down?

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- The economy may be in turmoil with financial markets swinging wildly amid investor uncertainty, but at T-Mobile, the nation's fourth largest wireless carrier in terms of subscribers, there is no plan to slow down on deployment of 3G wireless broadband services.

I sat down with Neville Ray, the company's senior vice president for engineering, and Cole Brodman, chief development officer, earlier this week at their headquarters to talk about how the credit crisis may affect them and whether or not it's terrible timing for the company's launch of its T-Mobile G1 cell phone built on Google's Android platform.

Ray and Brodman dispelled any concerns T-Mobile may be in trouble because of the credit crisis. Its German parent company, Deutsche Telecom, is strongly positioned to pay down debt on its balance sheet, they said. And the company has no plans to delay its rollout of upgraded network speeds and quality.

Mobile's 3G high-speed data network is live in more than 21 major metropolitan markets -- including Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

The Washington, D.C. area will get T-Mobile's 3G network before the end of the year, after long negotiations with federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, to clear out spectrum that the carrier used for technological upgrades.

That deployment is important as the firm rolls out its greatly anticipated G1 Android phone, which will need the high-speed data service to fully take advantage of all the Internet features of the phone.

Ray said pre-sale orders for the G1 Android phone is about triple the carrier's initial expectations. But the firm wouldn't give hard numbers on how many pre-sales have been recorded. The executives said studies have shown cell phone service is viewed as a staple for consumers, one that many are unwilling to give up in tough economic times.

Brodman admits, however, that the phone will begin retail sales this month with lots of uncertainty as to whether consumers will be motivated to buy a new phone.

"Gravity is the issue for us. We can only control what we can control," Broadman said.

Mobile phone use causes skin problems

Mobiles have become the ultimate necessity in our lives today. But researchers have warned that cell phone users are at risk of getting an itchy skin problem.

A team from the British Association of Dermatologists has found that mobile users are increasingly developing rashes on their faces and ears caused by an allergic reaction to the nickel on handsets.

And, according to the researchers, the phenomenon is being seen in people who do spend long periods of time on the phone, the British media reported.

As a large number of people are sensitive to nickel, which is used extensively in cell phone handsets, including buttons and surround of the screen, the team has dubbed the phenomenon "mobile phone dermatitis" where the skin becomes red, inflammed, blistered, dry and cracked.

Moreover, according to the researchers, women have a higher risk of developing mobile phone dermatitis, as they are more likely to have been previously sensitised to the metal following an allergic reaction to nickel-coated jewellery.

"The allergy results from frequent skin contact with nickel-containing objects. Prolonged or repetitive contact with a nickel-containing phone is more likely to cause a skin reaction in those who are allergic.

"If you've had a previous reaction to a nickel-coated

belt-buckle or jewellery, for example, you are at greater risk

of reacting to metal phones.

"In mobile phone dermatitis, the rash would typically

occur on the cheek or ear, depending on where the metal part

of the phone comes into contact with the skin. In theory, it

could even occur on fingers if you spend a lot of time texting

on metal menu buttons," the Association's Dr Graham Lowe was

quoted as saying. PTI MOT