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."
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