It won't be long until cell phones take you online to battle other competitors

Cell phone tennis, anyone? It's not here yet, but soon.<br><br>Online wireless video gaming will soon be arriving on your cell phone. While these games initially won't boast the technical sophistication

Friday, April 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Cell phone tennis, anyone? It's not here yet, but soon.

Online wireless video gaming will soon be arriving on your cell phone. While these games initially won't boast the technical sophistication of their personal computer counterparts, they may persuade you to invest in that new digital cell phone you've had your eye on.

Online wireless games, as well as wireless Internet service, are becoming technologically feasible, thanks to the emergence of a more sophisticated standard wireless programming language called Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP.

But new WAP-enabled devices are just beginning to trickle into the consumer market, and indiqu, a mobile data services company based in California, is looking to speed the process by introducing its stand-alone qu Serve wireless entertainment software platform in the second half of 2000. "Localized, contextual and personalized" is how James Newcomb, indiqu CEO, chairman and co-founder, describes the qu Serve wireless platform.

Able to work on any pre-existing digital cellular phone, qu Serve will offer a range of online services tailored to individual users, such as qu Vertical for skiers and qu Tribe for kids and teenagers.

But the platform with perhaps the most potential is qu Serve's games platform, called qu Vox. It will allow users to access simple online games over digital wireless devices. Major game developers such as iEntertainment and Infogrames have signed on to provide game content for qu Vox, although initially the games will be fairly rudimentary.

"We're still in the game development phase right now," says John Voorhees, iEntertainment's vice president of business development and wireless services, "but the type of games we will initially be offering will be hangman, card games, things like that."

"Later on, you'll start to see more nontraditional games like online sports fantasy leagues or trivia games where users can compete for prizes over their online phone network. You'll be able to download the shell of the game to your wireless device permanently, and then you can download new questions weekly or monthly, depending on the format," Mr. Voorhees says.

In effect, your cellular phone becomes a Game Boy. Using your digital cellular phone, you download the game from an Internet game portal and play it on the LCD screen.

"The exciting thing is that you can play these games without being either at your home or office," says Dave Murray, vice president of marketing for iEntertainment. "You walk and take your computer with you and can play games wherever you are."

But WAP and qu Vox are only the first steps toward a wireless online gaming universe, Mr. Voorhees says.

"Within the next 18 to 24 months, I expect that mobile wireless technology will evolve to the point where HTML, the standard Web programming language for computers now, will displace WAP as wireless devices acquire full-color displays, faster processors and quicker data access speeds.

"Then you'll be able to play multi-player Java [more graphically enhanced] games on your wireless device, and what you'll start to see are wireless devices operating like a network terminal," he says.

At some point, game companies will be able to offer the exact same games to wireless online gamers as they do to traditional home computer online users. For now, indiqu is hoping users will gravitate to qu Vox as well as its other qu Serve platforms.

There are hurdles to be overcome, though, before qu Serve goes mainstream. Cost, as with any new technology, is one potential barrier to widespread demand for qu Serve, but Mr. Newcomb and Mr. Voorhees agree that much of the cost can be picked up by online advertising.

While most people cringe at the thought of online advertising and some consider it intrusive, indiqu and iEntertainment are betting that most users will recognize that online advertising is a necessary and perhaps even desirable facet of the online world. "If you turn on your phone and a page from Coca-Cola splashes up for a few seconds, the average customer is not going to object when they realize that the ad pays for the customer's first four minutes online," Mr. Newcomb says.

Furthermore, ads would be specifically tailored to each user, Mr. Newcomb says. So, for example, golfers would see ads for clubs, balls, shoes and other related items. "Very little of this will be subscription-based," Mr. Newcomb says. "Each service will be available to every user and can be tailored to their specific requests."

Does this mean the end of the Internet as we know it? Well, not for awhile. Mobile wireless devices are still limited by their power, display quality and battery life, so don't trash your new Pentium 700 just yet.

Also, the demand for wireless mobile Internet access has yet to catch fire, what with the current slow access speeds and limited availability of wireless Internet service. So there is some question as to whether there is actually a market for indiqu's services. "I don't think we've sold a single phone to anybody who wanted it for Internet access," says Clio Shallabi, a retail sales representative at Joseph's Electronics in Mesquite, Texas. "A couple of people have asked about it, but mostly it's for businessmen and people like that."

Then again, indiqu and iEntertainment have their sights set on a different market. "If someone says 'I've got CNN on my cell phone,' I say 'So what?' Wireless users want entertainment as well," Mr. Newcomb says.

Mr. Newcomb points out that in Europe, where cell phones are much more prevalent than in the United States, by far the single most requested gift among kids ages 10 to 15 is a cellular phone. In fact, according to Sweden-based mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson, 73 percent of the population of Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway has a mobile telephone. In the United States, a recent report by the Department of Transportation, available online at www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/research/wireless, underscores how dramatically the demographics of cellular phone users has changed in recent years. According to the report, the entire mobile wireless market is growing about 40 percent per year, and the report estimates that there are about 80 million mobile wireless devices such as cell phones, pagers and personal digital assistants, or PDAs, now being used in the United States.

The report cites a 1996 Motorola Cellular Impact Survey that noted "a continuation in the trend toward more users among the younger (under 25) and the older (55 and older) age groups." "Cellular phones are rapidly becoming standard accessories for teenage dates, walks in the park and senior citizen motor trips," the report says. New purchasers of cellular phones report using their phones for business calls 48 percent of the time. iEntertainment and indiqu are both targeting young, affluent new users who see their phones and pagers as entertainment rather than business tools. "The hardcore 3-D high-end gamers may be disappointed in the near term" by the type of games initially available, Mr. Voorhees says, but iEntertainment expects to attract mostly casual gamers interested either in the online prize games or "travelers stuck in the airport who are looking for something to entertain themselves with for a few minutes."

Neither indiqu nor iEntertainment are looking to topple the home computer Internet segment. What indiqu sees is in fact a different, much larger market than the traditional PC Internet market. "Worldwide, there are many more wireless phones than there are Internet connections, so you can see that the wireless market is much bigger than the Internet market," Mr. Newcomb says. "Right now, everyone thinks of cell phones when they think of mobile wireless devices, but at some point I think scaled-down notebook computers with high-speed wireless modems are going to become the standard" that will allow wireless games to become more sophisticated, Mr. Voorhees says.

Cell phones will still be used for e-mail and online shopping, Mr. Voorhees predicts, but multimedia programs such as wireless browsers and online games will run on more high-powered wireless portable computers.

There are still some technical kinks to be worked out, Mr. Voorhees acknowledges.

Currently, most mobile wireless bandwidth is allocated for voice transmission rather than data. This limits the amount of data that can be transmitted, and the memory constraints of current mobile wireless devices can't take advantage of faster transfer speeds yet anyway. But Mr. Voorhees expects consumer demand for wireless Internet access to increase dramatically, just as it did with personal computer Internet access to the World Wide Web a few years ago. "For an Internet company to expand, it's going to have to tap into the consumer demand for mobile wireless access," Mr. Voorhees says, which will drive companies to resolve the technical problems as quickly as they can.

Among the innovations Mr. Voorhees predicts will occur are better data compression techniques and faster access speed.
Currently wireless data can be transmitted at between 9.6 and 19.6 kilobits per second, but Mr. Voorhees suggests that in a year or two speeds of up to 400 kilobits per second will be possible.

Predicting the future is always tricky, and wireless technology developers remain hesitant about making any intractable predictions. "Ultimately, it's anybody's guess how all this will turn out," Mr. Voorhees says, "because in a couple of years the Web will have evolved beyond its current form and it's hard to say exactly what wireless devices and wireless online games will look like." But no matter how it all shakes out, the wireless world is about to get a lot more fun.

Victor Godinez is a free-lance writer in Irving, Texas.