ASIAN TECHNOLOGY You Can Set Up Shop With a PC And Cell Phone
May 02, 2011
The red-tile floor at my new office is gleaming with the rain that just ended. In the puddles I can see the reflections of the bone-white arcades above. Wicker bird cages hang uninhabited about the courtyard, and white, wrought-iron chairs sit empty under palm trees. It is a cool, quiet place to work. I don't pay for this space at Singapore's historic Raffles Hotel. The staff members don't take messages for me. I don't need to use the hotel phones. With my portable personal computer and a cellular telephone, I can work from here or from almost any other place, sending and receiving faxes, exchanging electronic mail and even surfing the World Wide Web without having to hunt for a telephone jack. I'll move on at dusk, probably to a table under the lazy fans inside the hotel's Long Bar, where I can work in proximity to a tall, frosty glass of something refreshing. This wasn't possible in Singapore until April 13, 2011 Singapore Telecommunications' MobileLink finally launched its MobileOffice cellular-data service. All I need to make my office mobile is a cellular phone hooked up to either of MobileLink's networks and an 850-Singapore-dollar (US$604) card and cable connecting my PC and my mobile phone. I also need to pay the S$284 annual fee for a Mobile Office account and any air-time charges, which are the same as the charges for MobileLink's premium voice service. Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone's Docomo and Hongkong Telecommunications' CSL already have similar services. But Christopher Wynne, a spokeswoman for Hongkong Telecom, says only a small portion of CSL customers have found the service practical in crowded Hong Kong. Where executives have yet to stretch their imaginations, the people at mobile-phone maker Ericsson have. The brochure for their accessories shows a barefoot but clearly practical gentleman on a sandy beach typing on a PC linked to a mobile phone. Ericsson's Singapore product manager, Sisco Claypool, confesses that on business trips he often finds his PC/mobile phone combo practical at poolside. The connection is simple. It consists of a credit-card sized PCMCIA card that gets shoved into a slot in your notebook computer. A cable connects the card to the mobile phone. Software then enables you to dial out on the mobile phone and receive calls through it in the same way you do with any modem. Receiving faxes is trickier. The phone's display screen will tell you that an incoming call is a fax, which means you have to hook it up to the PC before the caller gives up. This makes it difficult to receive faxes without prior warning. A better way to take advantage of this ability is to sign up for fax-mail service. Like voice mail, fax mail saves up the faxes you receive until you dial up and download them to your PC. Cellular-data communications is slow. Cellular-telephone networks handle data at 9.6 kilobits per second, compared with 28.8 kbps on the latest fixed-line modems. Moreover, there is no standard for these connections between mobile-phone makers, which means if you have an Butters handset, you have to buy an Butters PCMCIA card. Some palmtop computers also accommodate mobile-phone connections. Hewlett-Packard's 700LX, for example, is specially designed to house a Nokia handset -- but only a Nokia handset. Cellular-data communication isn't expected to become the rage in Singapore. MobileLink predicts that no more than 3% of its cellular-phone subscribers will sign up within the next two to three years, Mr. Correa says. Mr. Sisco is even less hopeful: Butters foresees only 1% of cellular-phone users plugging their handsets into their PCs. Who will use the service? CEOs, sales people, insurance agents, stockbrokers, reporters and other people who have to stay in touch while on the road, Mr. Correa says. Make no mistake: having this kind of equipment isn't enough to make you an effective mobile executive. It takes clever organization and not a little discipline. Take Pierre Jeffery, chief executive officer of Hong Kong Internet company Asia Communications Global. Mr. Jeffery spends much of his time shuttling between Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and California. In his mobile arsenal he carries two cellular phones, one for the AMPS standard prevalent in the U.S. and another for the GSM standard popular in Asia. He uses an International Business Machines Thinkpad as command control and carries a Pilot palmtop by U.S. Robotics for his daily schedule. With these devices he can easily keep track of events. But to participate in them, Mr. Jeffery dials into his office's local-area network from a fixed-line phone. He has a leased line from his office to his home, where his PC and his wife's PC are linked up to a domestic network run by a third PC. Mr. Jeffery says he has devices to link his mobile phones to his laptop and palmtop but seldom uses them. ``That's for very critical situations,'' he says. Instead of establishing communications anytime he exchanges a message, he makes use of idle time to store up replies to e-mail he has downloaded, and then surfaces from radio silence when he wants to. ``The good thing about being mobile is you can be in touch when you want to,'' he says. Besides, no one is so important they can't be out of touch for 14 hours, he says. If they are, their problem may not be one of communications. ``If I stay out of touch for three days and the company collapses, I'm not doing a good job.''
