Subject: [NEXTEL-1] How Pushy Are You?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 01:13:48 -0500

How Pushy Are You?
No longer just for businesses, push-to-talk phones are heading your 
way
By WILSON ROTHMAN

Monday, Dec. 15, 2003
If you or someone you love carries a Nextel mobile phone, you know 
the chirp. For years Nextel has been the only national carrier 
with "push to talk" service. Rather than place calls and having to 
dial all those numbers, users can chat with each other walkie-talkie 
style, coast to coast. To initiate a conversation, you press a 
button on the side of your phone, which sends an attention-getting 
chirp to your buddy's phone. In recent weeks, Sprint PCS and Verizon 
Wireless have introduced their own push-to-talk phones.

Even though Nextel developed push to talk for business use, it's the 
off-peak appeal that makes it hot. People are using it at 
supermarkets and ski lodges, anywhere that a short burst of chatter 
from a speaker works better than a drawn-out conversation, phone to 
ear. You can even talk in a group, like a voice chat room. 

Each carrier's system is different, and there's no operability 
between them. In our tests, Nextel's Direct Connect started up more 
quickly and relayed messages faster than the two newcomers. Though 
measured in split seconds, the lags between bursts of talk can make 
a conversation feel painfully slow. Nextel's 10 push-to-talk phones 
include a BlackBerry PDA ($350) and the new Motorola i730 ($300), 
which is chunky but sports a 65,000-color screen and a great-
sounding speakerphone.

Aiming its Ready Link push-to-talk service at Generation Y, Sprint 
has launched three Sanyo handsets, including the rugged RL2000 
($300) and the video-camera-equipped VM4500 ($380). Playing Cyclops 
to Sprint's Wolverine, Verizon put out the conservative Motorola 
V60p ($150), a modified two-year-old executive model with a tiny 
black-and-white screen.

Sprint and Verizon have improved on Nextel's design in at least one 
way. Both separate push-to-talk contacts from regular phone-book 
entries. To start a chat on Nextel's service, you need to sort 
through your phone book until you find your push-to-talk buddy. With 
Sprint and Verizon, a tap of the side talk button brings up your 
push-to-talk buddies and groups.

Neither Sprint nor Verizon did anything to improve on the chirp 
itself. You'd think that in the age of the ring tone you could 
download a new chirp, anything from a cat's meow to a foghorn, but 
both carriers leave you with a single, annoying alert. Your only 
alternative is "privacy mode." Every phone tested could vibrate 
instead of chirp and route sound to your ear instead of a speaker.

Truckers have long known that brevity is the soul of radio jabber. 
With push to talk, you'll find yourself ditching full thoughts for 
choppy exclamations that you fire off then await reply. Push to talk 
could be a welcome shove toward succinctness in phone chatter.

From the Dec. 15, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031215-557068,00.html

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