Word: handset
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When I finally reach my wife, I can speak to her through the telephone handset in the normal way. The connection is O.K., except that every once in a while the Net swallows random syllables and even whole words. I guess if you had to make frequent calls to France, say, you could learn to live with it. "Hello, Watson," I say to my wife. "_es," she says, I think. "We need to return those pants," I say. There's a pause. "Not another _air of __ton-_ly __ousers!" she says, I think...
Once the preserve of business users, mobile phones have become an everyday consumer appliance--even a fashion accessory. Alcatel claims to have taken 10% of the world phone market with a cheap handset available in rainbow colors that appeal to women. The marriage of prepaid calling cards and cheap mobile phones has made markets in Italy, Ireland and Portugal grow nearly 38% a year because there is no subscription fee or phone bill at the end of the month. In Israel some 200,000 units of a phone known as the Mango, which can call only one number, have been...
...cold-beer vendor on a hot beach, Iridium is more likely than ever to win those first and most eager customers--and the ones probably willing to pay top dollar for the new service. The company is betting that its charter customers will then balk at ditching their expensive handset for a Globalstar unit--even if the rates are cheaper...
...local cellular-network middlemen. But that wasn't very feasible in the glass-and-steel canyons of bustling cities, where customers would be out of the line of sight of the heavens and service would be spotty. (Imagine explaining to an irked CEO that his pricey new handset won't work from his office building unless he climbs to the roof.) Bowing to technological reality, Iridium decided that its phones should piggyback on terrestrial cell-phone networks. Then the question became--which ones? An Iridium phone needs different plug-in modules to speak the language of different cellular standards, like...
Will sat phones follow suit? Well, here's one clue: in 1979, Neiman Marcus featured a $36,500 home-satellite TV system in its Christmas catalog. This year, its stores are selling Motorola's Iridium handset. Those who buy it will not only be able to call home and wish folks Happy Holidays from their Caribbean vacation this December; they'll also be able to look up and watch the three large-array antennas on an Iridium satellite line up with the sun, triggering a flash of light for careful observers back down on Earth...