Cell phones you
can't have ... yet

By Thomas Jackson

updated 3:57 p.m. ET Feb. 25, 2005

We've got some pretty slick phones on the American market today. From Motorola's Razr to Nokia's art-deco-inspired 7280, each is a pocketful of gadgets-camera, MP3 player, video game console and PDA-magically converged into one sleek package. But compared to their Asian counterparts, our handsets look a bit like grandpa's Automatic Electric.

Take Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo's new 901i series. These wireless hot rods are capable of four-way videoconferencing and high-speed mobile Internet surfing (up to 384 kilobytes per second). The 901is can send e-mail with attachments as large as 500 kilobytes. They can act as TV remote controls and have 3-D screens with up to 262,144 colors.

Each model has at least a two-megapixel camera and miniature "3-D sound" speakers. One even has a biometric fingerprint sensor to ensure that no one can use the phone but its owner, and three of the five models come with a nifty function called FeliCa, which enables the 901i to serve as a digital wallet. You download cash into the phone's guts, then simply swipe it over a FeliCa reader at the local mini-mart.

Almost anything else you might place in your wallet -- a gym membership ID, video-store card or tickets to a concert -- can be digitized on a FeliCa-enabled handset. Some apartment buildings in Tokyo are even making their locks compatible. Now that's convergence.

There are a few reasons why we don't have phones like the 901i here in the U.S.A. For one, a mobile device is only as advanced as the network it runs on, and our networks are a mess.

While the Japanese and South Koreans have aggressively cleared real estate on the wireless spectrum specifically for lightning-fast, third- generation systems (3G), our FCC has taken a more laissez-faire approach toward the big carriers' use of bandwidth. The result is an electromagnetic soup where our existing second-generation (2G) networks jockey for position with UHF channels, digital TV broadcasts, emergency/medical networks and even garage door openers.

With so much clutter, carriers are struggling to find space for 3G networks similar to DoCoMo's, although Verizon has cobbled together a semblance of one in 32 cities. The FCC recently announced that it won't auction space for true 3G networks until the middle of 2006.

Meanwhile, DoCoMo is already mapping out a staggeringly fast 4G network that will allow users to download data at speeds of 100 megabytes to 1 gigabyte per second.

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