The Hindu : Finally, phone-web `sangam' is here

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 22, 2004

National

National

Finally, phone-web `sangam' is here

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, MARCH 21. Indian mobile phone users can finally harness the web, as the majority of handset makers and service providers now offer general packet radio service (GPRS), the enabling technology which chops up text and pictures, both still and video, into small packets of data that are compatible with the Internet Protocol (IP).

The GPRS was first brought to the country by BPL over two years ago, at a time when the idea of multimedia messaging (MMS) was a novelty and hardly any handsets were GPRS-enabled. And since few Internet websites were created with the tiny screen of a mobile in mind, it was, in practice, difficult to do your surfing from your cell phone. All that has changed in 2004.

Today, almost all major cellular providers in India offer GPRS and multimedia messaging services, though the way they charge for it can vary. Customers were clearly unhappy with earlier pricing mechanisms where they were charged for kilobytes sent or received. Most providers charge a flat monthly fee for GPRS access.

The cheapest service is that of Hutch (Orange in some territories): a flat Rs. 99 per month. The company which operates in 10 circles, nationwide, has seen its customer base for the service grow fifteen fold within a year to nearly 70,000 today.

Bharti/Airtel was the first Indian cellular company last year to provide roaming GPRS facility — it launched the service in Delhi in partnership with Singtel, enabling subscribers to seamlessly roam in both India and Singapore.

When it comes to handsets, GPRS is almost a default feature these days in all except the cheapest models. After the customs duty cuts in the recent mini-budget, almost all models of Global Services Mobile (GSM) phones — the type required by the national cellular providers — that cost Rs. 6000 and more today, are GPRS-enabled now.

They enable users to reach web sites such as Yahoo, MSN, Rediff and others, which have been specially created in `lite' editions for easy-viewing on hand sets.

The popular free email service Hotmail, is enabled by some service providers to send and read mail, at SMS charges of a rupee a go.

GPRS and the multimedia messaging that rides on its back can best be exploited by handsets that have a built-in camera. The almost simultaneous announcement last week, by phone makers Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung, of a model by year-end, with a built-in camera capable of taking a 1 mega-pixel (that is 1 million pixels or dots) picture, brings to the lay phone owner, the ability to click and instantly e-mail, pictures of an acceptable quality for making prints (albeit half the size of a postcard).

Phone or lifestyle statement?

Typical of the new breed of cell phones which exploit tools such as camera, GPRS and multimedia to help customers make an in-the-face lifestyle statement, is Nokia's model 7600 — its unusual shape defying description, unless one is familiar with an American football. Compatible with both rival standards — dual band GSM and Wideband CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), which in India means the twin markets of national cellular and wireless in local loop (WLL) — the 7600 is lightweight at just 123 grams and fits flat in the palm of one's hand. Its GPRS connectivity is 384 kbps, which makes it nearly six times faster than the standard telephone modem.

However, sending and receiving multimedia messages showed that zippy transmission is not every thing. Unlike the Internet email services we are used to, these mobile mails must pass through the gateway of the service provider — two providers if you are sending from phone to phone.

One can click one's own picture with the built-in camera and mail it as a multimedia attachment to one's email account. One could as well have sent a video clipping, though the file size would be considerably larger — nearly 1 megabyte. You can also add a voice track of 15 seconds.

The phone incorporates a wireless web browser to Wireless Internet Protocol and HTML standards and one can visit the home page of the provider — in this case Hutch — which draws information from the MSN web page to provide news feeds. One can also preset other `favourite' web pages.

One useful feature is the ability to latch the 7600 to a notebook or pocket PC via a USB or Universal Serial Bus Port and to use it as an external modem. More fun-oriented, is its built-in MP3 player and its ability to play almost 1 hour of CD-quality music.

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