mkl@nw.com (Mark Lottor) (04/29/91)
I recently purchased an OKI 900 handheld cellular phone and this is a review of the OKI, along with my comments on the phones I didn't get. I decided to get a handheld phone, and decided I should get a fairly small one for most convenient use. The choice was between the Motorola Micro-Tac, the Fujistu Commander, the Mistubishi 3000/99x, the NEC P-300, and the OKI 900. The NEC P-300 is the largest of the phones and also the heaviest (14oz). It has some neat features like escalating ringing tones. However, it also feels like a square block of wood, and the case felt sort of cheap and not too sturdy. Because of its size and weight I didn't consider it for very long. The Fujitsu Pocket Commander is a pretty neat phone. However, it comes standard with the extra-talk-time battery instead of the slim battery. This makes it heavier than advertisements lead you to believe (11.9oz instead of 10.2), and makes the phone fairly thick and bulky. If you buy the slim battery to get the small size advantage then your talk time goes down to 45 minutes or only seven hours standby. This means that if you talk for five or ten minutes early on, your battery will die out around five hours of use. Besides these problems however, are two missing features. You don't get continuous touch tones from the keypad (only one of two length settings). There is also no got-a-call-in-absense indicator. I needed this so I would know if I missed a call that would then have been transfered to voice-mail. The display is only ten characters wide, too small for displaying both a name and number. Also the mouth piece feels like it will break off if you happen to cough into it. It could be a nice phone if you used the slim battery and only turned it on to make short outgoing calls. The Mistubishi 99x and 3000 phones are probably the smallest of the phones. They come in at 10.4oz, making them pretty light too, but thats with the standard short-life battery. Standby time is nine hours or 45 minutes talk. Again, this translates into much less than nine hours standby if you talk for ten minutes. I needed a phone that could standby for an eight-hour work day even after I had used it a bit. The high-capacity battery makes these times reasonable but adds 1.5 inches to the length of the phone making it as big as the NEC. The physical design of the phone also makes it feel more like a movie-prop or a kids toy than a real working phone. The phone is almost completely flat so it doesn't curve around your face, and the mouthpiece doesn't get anywhere near your mouth. The buttons are also a bit small, even worse on the 3000. The Motorola Micro-Tac / Flip-phone has been around a while now (Rumor has it a new model called the Star-Lite will be out in six months). Again, it comes standard with the thick-heavy battery, so it's short and bulky. It weighs in at 12.3oz. Talk time runs around 75 minutes and standby of 20 hours. When it's flipped open the phone feels pretty nice, although the mouth-piece feels like it might break off easily. Functionality and features are pretty limited compared to the other phones. The phone only has a seven-digit display, and LED at that. Reminds me of the first generation of digital watches and calculators. I kept thinking 'boy is this thing old'. It's also pricey. Then comes the OKI 900. It was announced in January of 1991. Its very slightly larger than the Mitsubishi (its 6.5x2.1x1 inches) and comes standard with the slim battery. It weighs in at 12.7 ounces and so is slightly heavier, and has a talk time of 70 minutes or 12 hours standby. Optional thick battery only adds one ounce but ups this to 24 hours standby! The earpiece and mouthpiece stick out a little, so the phone curves around your face a bit and feels right. The phone also has a really nice solid quality feel to it. The keyboard buttons are big and feel great too, and the keyboard and display can be backlit if you want. The phone comes with two antennas, a short stub (one inch) and a longer flexible one (six inches). This is a slight drawback, but in good coverage areas you can get away with the stub antenna all the time. The OKI was rated best recently in Mobile Office magazine for electrical specifications, and some of this may be due to the phone having a 'real' antenna compared to the little wire that pops out of some of the other portables. This phone has LOTS of neat features, the more interesting described below. The phone has a continuous signal strength meter (unlike the Fujitsu), and a two-line eight-character display. It's also the only phone that can display upper and lowercase letters. Volume controls and lots of settings. Keypad touch-tone volume, ear-piece volume, and ringing volume (each in eight different settings) and four different ring sounds. Ringing and keypad can be muted too. The phone also provides side-tone so you can hear yourself talking in the earpiece (this is useful with handhelds so you can get the microphone at the right distance from your mouth). Optional beeping when leaving or entering service areas and also for one minute intervals when talking. Last call time counter and resettable total-time used counter. Five NAMS. 200 memories that hold eight characters and 32 digits each, searchable by partial name, of which ten are speed dials and ten are secret. Also an additional 32 memories that hold 16 characters and 11 digits for storing roamer access numbers. A phone number FIFO memo scratchpad holds last five numbers entered while talking, any of which can be saved in memory or dialed. Silent-keypad option for entering numbers into scratchpad during conversation, and mouthpiece mute control. Features are accessed thru three circular menus. The main menu gets you to often accessed features. A sub-menu gets you to user preference settings, and an administration menu (accessed with a passsword) lets you select NAMs, program calling-card info, call restriction modes (lots of them), and change your keyboard lock code. An 'online' user manual can be cycled thru to remind you of how to access various random functions. There is also a battery strength indicator bar-graph. Neat features: The phone can be set in a pager mode, where it will answer the phone and beep like a paging terminal. Caller touch-tones in phone number, and phone remembers last nine 'pages' for later recall. In this mode the phone can be set to turn off in five hours, and can also be turned off remotely with a password by calling it up. Ever neater: during conversation with someone, remote person can put phone in DTMF-Receive mode to send you a phone number, and, optionally, cause your phone to hangup the current call and immediately dial the new number! Great if you have a secretary. OKI is also supposed to be coming out with an RJ-11 jack adapter in a few months for use with modems, faxes, answering machines, etc. Getting into programming mode is also interesting. It took me quite a bit of hassling to get the 'secret' dealer password out of the place I purchased the phone at. However, things aren't that secure, as apparently OKI has a master password to unlock any phone. If you buy a phone I suggest you make getting any special dealer passwords a condition of your purchase. A quick call to OKI had the programming mode instructions faxed to me in a few minutes. Entering this mode displays the software version number and your ESN in hex. In this mode you can set up your NAMs and reset memories and air-time counters. You can also change your security code needed for the "administration" user-menu. In programming mode you can also personalize what the display shows when the phone is idle. BAY AREA CELLULAR SERVICE: I had to decide between the two evils of Cellular One/PacTel and GTE. Both rate plans are very similar. I made a spreadsheet of the two carriers and played around with different amounts of calling time and voice-mail charges. Total bills never differed by more than about $10 dollars. GTE could be more expensive if you use voice-mail heavily (they charge air-time rates for receiving and retreiving messages) or if you don't sign up for their one-year contract. I was told C-1 has a better system for portables than GTE. In the end I picked C-1 thru PacTel. The PacTel service rep had me sign a form saying I received a sticker that says conversations on cellular phones are not private; however, I got no such sticker, apparently in violation of California law. The GTE people gave me such a sticker even though I didn't take their service. Calls have some occasional slight noise, and occasional bursts of static and hiss; certainly nowhere near the "you'll hardly know the difference between a cellular call and a land-line call" claims from PacTel and other carriers. Coverage in mountain and coastal areas is practically zero, and hopefully they will add to those areas soon, so I can go out to the beach with a laptop PC and OKI's RJ-11 option!
John Higdon <john@zygot.ati.com> (04/29/91)
Mark Lottor <mkl@nw.com> writes: > BAY AREA CELLULAR SERVICE: I had to decide between the two evils of > Cellular One/PacTel and GTE. As a user of both systems, I could have told you precisely what the differences were. > In the end I picked C-1 thru PacTel. > [...] > Coverage in mountain and coastal areas is practically > zero, and hopefully they will add to those areas soon, so I can go out > to the beach with a laptop PC and OKI's RJ-11 option! GTE has perfectly acceptable coverage in the mountain and coastal areas. In fact, it has superior coverage overall, which is, I assume important to most cellular users. Cellular One has a MUCH more aggressive sales presence than GTE Mobilnet, but it is trading on the ghosts of times long past. GTE was the first system in the Bay Area and the "service" was attrocious. It was as bad as PacTel is now in Los Angeles. Coverage was terrible, calls frequently dropped, audio levels varied all over the map, plus a host of other problems. People could not wait for the "A" system to come on line. When Cellular One (PacTel/McCaw) opened for business, GTE Mobilnet customers lined up at the door. I was one of them. And it was a refreshing improvement. In the meantime, however, GTE was building and improving. It outstripped Cellular One in number of cell sites and developed one of the country's finest in-house RF engineering departments. Motorola was given a swift kick in the butt and told to fix the bugs in the EMX "or else". The result has been that GTE is clearly the technically superior system in the Bay Area. It has a wider coverage area and serves that area better than the competition. Since I have had at least one cellular account since it was available, it was no heartache to sign up for the "yearly" commitment (and get the cheaper rates). But Cellular One still has the attitude that is was entitled to in 1986. And times have changed. Since I use my phones heavily in the mountain areas, I would not dream of having Cellular One for my personal accounts. I am also not at all impressed with the "A" carrier roaming agreements, which seem to be more flaky. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !