What a mobile revolution!
New Straits Times (Malaysia)
March 11, 2003
By Anita Anandarajah
IN the latest Bond movie, Die Another Day, Zao, the North Korean baddie,
used the Sony Ericsson P800, a personal digital assistant (PDA)-cum-
camera, phone-cum-MP3 player to scan the British spy's image, and then
retrieve his bio data using Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) technology.
The list of high-tech accessories that come with handphones today
includes built-in digital cameras, radios, voice recorders, games,
polyphonic ring tones, voice tags (just say "Lambchop" and your
girlfriend's phone number will be automatically dialled),
calendar/planners, and stopwatches.
There was a time when a handphone cost RM6,000 and it was as large as a
water tumbler. But if you think that was bad, the first generation mobile
phone in the 1950s was as large as a briefcase!
Today, the sharp beep announcing a text message via the Short Message
Service (SMS) invades classrooms, cinemas and malls. One can communicate
with friends in another country at the cost of a local SMS, starting from
15 sen.
The ingenious (and the desperate) have found ways to exploit the SMS.
Just before a police raid takes place at a nightclub in Kuala Lumpur,
handphones start beeping. Under-aged patrons whip out their phones, read
the tip-off from a lookout stationed nearby, and make a beeline for the
nearest exit.
MMS seems to be the buzzword (or rather, an acronym) which is all the
rage in Kuala Lumpur. A step up from SMS, one can now send not only text
but also photographs, animation, music, and voice recordings to another
phone. You can even download a webpage from the Internet.
To enjoy this service, one must own a MMS-compatible phone. Those who
don't will receive an SMS informing them that they have received an MMS
message that can be retrieved at a specific website.
MMS-compatible phones like the Nokia 7650, a first-generation camera
phone that made its debut last year, have the ability to capture images
with 640x480 resolution, and a 3.6MB memory for the photo album to store
images, phonebook, calendar, messages, and add-on applications.
Newer camera phones can capture images in other sizes, which means there
are different file sizes to choose from and hence different levels of
quality.
These images can then be sent to another phone or to a computer via
infrared, bluetooth or (General Packet Radio Service) GPRS technology.
Using infrared, one simply has to point the infrared port on the phone
toward that of the computer, hit "Send" and voila! the image will appear
on the handphone screen or computer desktop.
With bluetooth, your camera phone need only be within a 10m radius of a
computer to be able to send it information, without the use of wires. As
for GPRS, the data will be sent via the internet.
But what happened to the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) phones,
which seem to have fallen out of favour because they were slow? According
to a spokesperson from local telecommunications company (telco) Celcom Sdn
Bhd, WAP is not dead, despite its decline in popularity.
"Most telcos launched WAP on the Global System for Mobile Communications
(GSM) in 1999. It ran on a circuit switch, which meant that a customer had
to dial up to a server first. This often took time, and occasionally the
line would be disconnected.
"There was also a lack of security during the dial up. Unscrupulous
people could hack into a banking transaction, for example. The WAP site
was not in colour either, appearing only in green letters against a
blackscreen. These were teething problems," he said.
Nokia Mobile Phones Malaysia product manager, Goh Doh Hau agrees that
WAP is very much alive today. The advent of colour screen mobile phones,
GPRS and XHTML will further enhance the browsing experience, he said.
XHTML is the next generation of markup language which evolved from WAP
1.1. Meanwhile GPRS will provide faster download experience compared to
circuit switched data.
The solution is WAP 2.0. Most telcos have the network in place, but it
has not been officially launched. The benefit of WAP 2.0, which now rides
on GPRS, a method for receiving information over the internet, is that it
is always "on", so that one can connect wireless almost immediately to the
desired WAP homepage. It is more secure, more colourful and offers MMS,
said the spokesperson from Celcom.
The next step for Malaysia will be the 3G, a generation of wireless
services, which is already big in Japan, pioneered by telco giant NTT
DoCoMo. What this enables us to do is view the person we are speaking to
on the handphone. But would we REALLY want to see our boss' face when we
are holidaying in Phuket?
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