As soon as Realtor Grant Hoffman sees a hot house for sale, he snaps a picture and fires it off by e-mail to clients using his new Palm Treo 700w “smart phone.”
Hoffman, based in Lafayette, once used a digital camera to do his work. But downloading pictures to his office computer in order to send them by e-mail took precious time away from sales.
“This eliminates a couple of steps, actually,” said Hoffman of the Treo. “It saves time, which is what it’s all about.”
But it’s not cheap. Hoffman bought the Treo for $399 as part of a two-year airtime contract with Verizon. He pays $44.99 for unlimited data service – such as pictures and e-mail – and $69 a month for 1,350 minutes of phone calls.
The mobile workforce once meant a road warrior with a cellphone, a laptop computer and a personal digital assistant.
Hoffman is an example of the new mobile worker, courted by telecom and technology companies to do all their business through a single handheld multimedia device.
Millions of Treos, BlackBerrys and other smart-phone devices are in use. Depending on the handset and service provider, users can do much more than make phone calls. Devices can send and receive e-mail and text messages, digital pictures, video and sound files.
“Anything they could do from their desktop, they can do now from their cell,” said Bob Kelley, a Verizon Wireless spokesman.
Fifteen percent of the traffic from all mobile phones involves such data traffic, more than double the 6 percent data use recorded in 2004, said Remy Fiorentino, a spokesman at Forrester Research.
Industry leader Cingular expects to see its 54 million customers send more digital photos and video clips from their phones in the first six months of this year than in all of 2005, said spokeswoman Anne Marshall.
The 51.3 million subscribers of Verizon Wireless sent nearly 135 million photos in the last three months of 2005, compared with 32 million sent in the same time period of 2004, according to Kelley.
Verizon Wireless spent about $5 billion across its network in 2005 and similar amounts in previous years to make sure its network can handle increased multimedia cellphone use, Kelley said.
While the overall consumer market for cellphone photography, text messaging and other data services has exploded, there are significant hurdles to making the hand-held mobile office a reality.
The business mobile e-mail and messaging market is estimated at up to 5 million users, according to In-Stat, a research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.
But In-Stat says that the industry isn’t prepared to seize the potential market of 30 million mobile workers.
“Subscribers need better handsets and greater network bandwidth to take advantage of the full range of mobile data services,” Allyn Hall, an analyst at In-Stat, said in a report that also cited a need for “more powerful processors, more memory, better screens and keyboards.”
Managers and salespeople at Old Mutual Capital in Denver are joining the handheld mobile workforce. But they are discovering business culture issues that technology can’t solve.
The financial firm recently paid about $2,250 to buy about 30 BlackBerry devices for its managers and salespeople, said Jay Brunger, director of technology and facilities.
Old Mutual pays about $1,500 a month – or $45 per device – for T-Mobile service. The BlackBerrys fit in the palm and have a keyboard and color screen and allow phone calls. There is no picture-taking ability.
The company’s BlackBerry users can always contact customers and each other as well as pull up information on spreadsheets while in the field or in meetings.
But the deployment has been controversial because the company’s BlackBerry users seem to spend more time sending messages than making phone calls or meeting face-to-face, Brunger said.
Although a salesperson might be able to send five or six e-mails in the same time it takes to have a phone conversation with one person, managers at Old Mutual aren’t sure that’s a good thing, Brunger said.
“You lose the personal touch,” Brunger said. “The value of a phone call is far more than an e-mail, since you can’t understand emotion on e-mail.”
Staff writer Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503 or bpotter@denverpost.com.
