LAS VEGAS -- Christmas has arrived early in Las Vegas.
Wireless carriers and manufacturers at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association's Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show Tuesday rolled out their best hopes for the holiday season: cell phones with near-VGA quality screens; phones with built-in video cameras, zoom and editing capabilities; and lighter, more powerful smartphones that are finally losing the clunkiness of the PDAs that inspired them.
Moving beyond early adopters, wireless companies say they are aiming squarely at the mass market this December. The companies are hoping that the new lines of low-cost, color phones will change picture and text messaging and wireless gaming from fringe phenomena to mediums as popular as the Internet.
"We're no longer looking at color phones as high-end consumer items," said analyst John Bucher of Harris Nesbitt Gerard. "This Christmas, they're mainstream and affordable."
Take the Audiovox CDM-8900. The phone displays 65,000 colors, has a serviceable camera, downloads and plays games written in Java and Qualcomm's BREW standard -- and will likely sell to consumers for less than $50, well below its original price when it was introduced in March, Bucher said.
At the high end, Audiovox unveiled its 9900 series phones, some of the first cell phones that can take both MPEG-4 video and pictures. The phones, which analysts guess will retail for about $300, can take up to 15 seconds of video, edit it and send it wirelessly to another phone or a computer. The phones also connect to computers directly through a USB cable.
Here are some of the other phones carriers are basing their gift-selling hopes on:
- Sony Ericsson P900. Like Audiovox's 9900 series, the P900, rolled out at the show, takes both MPEG-4 video and photos. It also includes a personal organizer, plays MP3 files and has a memory-stick slot to add up to 128 MB of removable memory. It will retail for between $450 and $600. Sony Ericsson is partnering with IBM to sell the phone to businesses.
- Sony Ericsson Z600. The first phone with a four-track music-creation tool and a mixing function that allows users to be phone DJs, this is also the first phone with removable clamshell covers. It has an estimated street price of $559.
- Treo 600. Handspring's latest smartphone is the first designed to be used almost entirely with one hand, except when using the text-messaging function. Sprint, the first carrier to get delivery of the phone, expects it to be one of the hot sellers this holiday season. The phone is priced at $395 for new Sprint customers or owners of the predecessor phone, the Treo 300, but expect price wars as other carriers start selling them.
- Slider. Kyocera's new phone is the first MTV-branded phone. Slider users on Virgin's cellular network will be able to download ring tones, graphics, news and other data from the music channel. The phone, said to retail for $159, will be available only on a pay-as-you-go subscription plan.
- BSquare's Power Handheld. It includes a GSM/GPRS phone, but it's really designed as a bridge between laptops and PDAs. It includes a brilliant VGA 640-by-480-pixel screen, Windows CE, slots for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi cards and the ability to read seemingly every known file attachment, from PDF to GIF. The estimated street price will be $650. It's available only in Europe until next year, so if you want one, you'll have to buy it from BSquare's German OEM, Hoeft & Wessel.
- N-Gage. By Christmas, Nokia will have as many as 18 console-quality games in stores for its gaming machine with full phone features. The device retails for $299.
