Greg Richards, a software engineer, plays an unusual game with his three children, ages 5, 3 and 1.
Sometimes, when Richards gets home from work in the Denver-Boulder corridor, his 5-year-old rings up his dad's cell phone. The kids crowd around the mobile phone and giggle when their picture pops up as a form of caller ID.
"They think it's neat that dad has a phone with a picture of them," Richards said. "My 21-month-old goes up to the phone, points at it and says, 'Me! Me! Me!'"
If Richards' cell-phone service provider, AT&T Wireless (AWE), had its way, all parents would play that game with their children. But not many are.
AT&T now offers nationwide general packet radio service: a high-speed cellular phone system that gives customers Internet content at speeds of up to 115 Kbps, twice as a fast as a typical dial-up modem on a desktop computer.
But GPRS has been around for two years in Europe and not many people have bought into it. The services are too expensive. Plus, not enough cell phones accommodate GPRS and not enough websites are formatted for viewing on cell phones.
The number of GPRS subscribers (or lack thereof) is apparently so embarrassing that wireless carriers, including AT&T, refuse to release those numbers.
"They'll put out the number of (GPRS) handsets for sale, but not the take-up rate," said Robin Hearn, an analyst for market research firm Ovum. "The reason they won't put out the take-up rate is because the take-up rate has been disappointing."
AT&T's GPRS service, branded as "mMode," is similar to Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless' high-speed Internet, which uses a competing technology called CDMA 2000 1x. All three carriers offer photo caller ID. Customers can also receive e-mail, tap into their corporate databases, read news and play games on their phones.
A Sony-Ericsson cell phone with a Bluetooth radio is unique to AT&T. It lets users interact wirelessly with other Bluetooth devices as long as they are no more than 30 feet apart. The phone can act as a wireless modem to transmit Internet content on a laptop that also has a Bluetooth chip or PC card.
AT&T also offers a "friend finder" feature that tells users the location of other cell-phone callers who have opted into the service. Once someone is located, the two parties have the option to talk, send a message or arrange a place and time to meet. If they agree to meet somewhere, the system automatically sends both parties directions on their cell phones.
For users, the only perceivable difference that exists between GPRS and CDMA 1x is the slightly faster transmission speeds boasted by CDMA 1x, which tops off at 144 Kbps. The fact that Sprint has stocked up on cell phones that are compatible with the latter technology is another plus for CDMA 1x, said Seamus McAteer, principal analyst for market research and consulting firm Zelos Group.
Still, GPRS is a more widely adopted technology worldwide, so AT&T customers can use their phones in more countries than Sprint customers. Approximately 141 cell-phone service providers in 64 countries offer GPRS, according to 3G Americas, a trade group that promotes GPRS.
But so far consumers remain reluctant to adopt the service.
A lack of content and not enough affordable GPRS-enabled cell phones to warrant a subscription are two factors keeping customers away, McAteer said. The CDMA 1x backers also provide more "competitive prices" than AT&T and other carriers in the GPRS camp, he added.
The basic transmission rate for AT&T's mMode service is $3 a month. The company then charges 2 cents per kilobyte of content downloaded onto the handset. The heavier data users can purchase "buckets" of bandwidth, starting at $8 a month. For $8, a user can send or receive up to 1 MB of content, which is about 75 e-mail messages, 50 instant messages and the ability to download 50 Web pages a month.
Some third-party content providers also charge for specific games and programs.
"There is not a large enough installed base of multimedia messaging-enabled handsets to support picture sharing to any great extent," McAteer said. "It'll take a while before (GPRS) has a real material impact on carriers' revenues."
Richards, of Colorado, however, isn't waiting. For now, he is devouring the services -- to his family's amusement and AT&T's satisfaction.
Along with downloading photographs of his family on the phone, Richards also checks his e-mail and pulls up stock quotes on the handset. He connects to his Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC by using his Sony Ericsson T68i phone as a modem. What surprised him most about GPRS is how simple it is to retrieve information.
"I am an engineer, or maybe it's a guy thing, but I don't read the manual," he said. "It was unbelievably easy to configure."
