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The World in the Palm of Your Hand
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Business New Haven
9/7/1998
By: BNH
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With the purchase of a personal communication service comes a digital wireless handset that includes an array of features - voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, three-way calling, alphanumeric paging. Three of the five wireless companies in Connecticut are also offering a component called “short text e-mail messaging.”
Bell Atlantic Mobile, Nextel, and Omnipoint currently offer short text e-mail messaging in their many price plans. SNET and Sprint PCS plan to introduce the feature soon.
For most subscribers, the advantage of short text e-mail messaging means they can use their digital handsets to receive brief Internet electronic messages while away from home. You no longer have to be connected to a computer to read your e-mail - the short text message appears on the handset's screen.
“Features like short text messaging is one of the reasons we call them handsets and not phones,” says Omnipoint's Ellen Webner. “There is so much information available to you right in the palm of your hand.”
How does it work? Activation of your digital wireless handset provides an assigned e-mail address (the digital handset phone number@name of service provider). Messages can be sent in three ways: through the digital service provider's Web site, through an e-mail service, or through an operator at the provider's information center. Either way, the e-mail is forwarded to the subscriber's handset address.
The messages themselves cannot be very long. For Omnipoint customers that means no more than 160 characters (approximately two lines of text). Currently, Bell Atlantic Mobile customers can send only a 50-character message, but plans are in the works to increase this to 100 characters. Nextel customers can send messages of up to 140 characters. When the message has to include the name and address of both the recipient and the sender that doesn't leave much room for a message.
At the moment, digital handset owners cannot send short text e-mail messages from their handset, but in 1999 Bell Atlantic Mobile plans to introduce a new handset that will allow that capability.
E-mail messages are stored by the service providers for a set number of days, ranging from five days for Nextel customers to 14 days for Omnipoint customers. If the messages are not retrieved they are automatically deleted by the service provider.
Omnipoint subscribers receive a minimum of ten short e-mail messages with their basic monthly price plan. Bell Atlantic Mobile offers the service in two ways. For $19.99 a month, text messages can be sent to a handset by an operator. For $5.99 a month, text messages can be sent from the Internet by e-mail or through Bell Atlantic Mobile's Web site.
Nextel provides up to 25 messages in its Performance 120 plan and charges ten cents for each additional message sent through its Web site, or 50 cents per message sent through an operator. Nextel also offers message delivery verification - a feature the others have not yet added.
“We're trying to meet the needs of our business customers,” says Joseph Kobylak, vice president and general manager for Nextel's Connecticut and Massachusetts market. “We're aiming to expand the features we offer. Our handset is designed to save the business person time and time is money. We think our product is a real plus for business.”A
- F.P.
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