Posted on 12-3-2003

New, Worse
By MATT RICHTEL, NYT 10 March03

The mobile telephone has evolved into a sleek multifunctional marvel. It can store e-mail addresses and hundreds of phone numbers. It can emit any of dozens of ring tones or vibrate silently. It can be used to play games and double as a digital camera even as it is small enough to fit in cigarette case.

But for all these wireless wonders, industry analysts, researchers and consumers say that many of the sleek, versatile new models are simply not as good as the old ones at being telephones. "Not only is reception a lot poorer, but the phones eat up battery life, so there's less talk time," said Michael King, a mobile data analyst. Games are nice, but "the majority of the time, we're talking on these things," Mr. King said. "If they can't do that well, what's the point really?"

While the battery-life problem is one that manufacturers say users must accept as a trade-off for smaller size and more features, the reception issue arises from the trend of making phones sleeker by putting their antennas inside, instead of using the external, stubby pinky-size antenna fixtures found on other cellphones, old and new. Research from Ethertronics, a San Diego company that researches antenna capacity and manufacturers mobile-phone antennas, indicates that, all other things being equal, the radio strength of today's phones with internal antennas is 15 percent to 20 percent less powerful than that of phones with external antennas.

The contention that new phones have sub-par reception is one that phone makers dispute, to a point. Several major makers, including Nokia and Sony Ericsson, a joint venture of the two companies, said that, generally speaking, their new phones were as good as the old ones, and met the needs of consumers and network carriers. And they noted that external antennas frequently break. But the companies stopped short of directly addressing the relative strengths of internal and external antennas. When asked about the issue, Sony Ericcson issued a statement discussing the complexity of reception issues, including radio frequency, or R.F., technology. "Generalizations regarding R.F. performance should be avoided, as many factors come into play that determine its quality." The company cited a few such factors, including the design of the radio frequency circuits. At Nokia, a company spokesman, Charles Chopp, said that one reason the company had moved to internal antennas was that broken antennas were "one of the top 10 complaints about cellular phones." Users prefer the "ease and carryability" of phones with internal antennas, he said. Mr. Chopp said that in adopting internal antennas, the company had "made a point of giving the end user a better experience." And, he said, "These antennas provide the interaction experience that is acceptable to the carriers."

But the nation's biggest cellphone carrier, Verizon Wireless, refuses to sell phones that have internal antennas.

Jim Jerace, a spokesman for Verizon, which has 30 million subscribers, said the company required makers of handsets for its network "to pass a certain level of performance before they are certified, and one requirement is they have an antenna that is capable of going up." Verizon retail stores sells phones made by Motorola, Kyocera and LG Electronics, among others, but only models with external antennas. "If an antenna is squeezed into casing, it won't have the same capability," Mr. Jerace said. "The larger the surface area of the antenna, the better the reception."

Whatever the power trade-offs, phone makers are intent on giving consumers smaller phones with more features to stimulate sales in a slumping market. Casey C. Ryan, an analyst with Wells Fargo Securities, said global sales of phones fell below 400 million units last year from 412 million in 2001. Mr. King, the Gartner analyst, said that two years ago, consumers typically replaced their phones once a year. Lately, they are waiting 18 to 24 months, he said.

In fact, consumers have little choice. For instance not one of the Nokia models on display last week had an external antenna. The only two phones for sale with outboard antennas were models by Siemens and Motorola.

Bruce A. Gray, the chief executive of Ethertronics, said there were a variety of technical reasons why internal antennas tend not to work as well as external ones. A crucial factor, he said, is that the internal antennas now found in many cellphones can interfere with the phone's other circuitry. Mr. Gray said the interference can cause static or dropped calls. But those problems tend to be less severe in densely populated areas where the cellular phone networks have placed more cell sites. The nearer the proximity to a cell site, the less a problem the interference creates. He said that cellphone makers started heavily pushing phones with internal antennas in Europe about three years ago, and in the United States about 18 months ago. "They knew they could decrease performance, but they would also decrease the amount of antenna breakage," he said. But, he added, "Internal antennas hit the market three years before they were ready."