The latest telecom offerings.

• Author: King, Heather
• Position: Business Trends

New gizmos and services

Anyone who ventures to an office every day is surrounded by devices designed to facilitate communication. At minimum, a typical office might include a desk phone and a computer. Professionals might also carry a cell phone, pocket PC or laptop, and the list of applications available to run on all of these devices is mind-boggling. In keeping pace with this ever-changing technology, Utah telecommunications companies offer some of the industry's newest items.

Cell Phones and Service

"People seem to be moving away from the talking side on the phone and getting more into the data side," Jeff Croft, store manager at Omniserve Wireless explains. Phones with Internet access and data capability (i.e. web-enabled) are hot items on the market. Croft has seen business people and college students buying Motorola's P280 phone at a record pace over the past two months. The P280 comes with a kit that allows people to connect their Internet-capable phone to a pocket PC or a laptop computer for wireless access while on the job or on campus.

Croft recommends VoiceStream's service plans to complement the P280 because the company offers fast, user-friendly menu service when it comes to data capabilities. When combined with the P280, for example, customers working on a laptop can access a constant Internet connection with no dial-up and speeds faster than 56K.

Another service rapidly gaining favor, according to Dean Anderson, account manager for Salt Lake City-based ProTel NetWorks, is Unified Communicator/Messaging by Inter-Tel. "Basically, from a web-enabled cell phone you can be connected to the office and you can change your availability, your forwarding or the status of your phone. All this can be done from either a web-enabled cell phone or from a web page." Anderson explains that the main benefit of Unified Communicator/Messaging is that it allows customers to take control of their own calls. Ultimately, he says, the caller dials one number and is connected with the person he called--regardless of where the receiver is or what phone is being used.

Dave Glissmeyer, chief executive officer at ProTel, suggests another option: "The hottest thing in telephones today is applications. One is Auto Call Record. It records calls in a WAV file and then that file can be sent anywhere over e-mail. Unified Messaging is also a hot product," he says.

With the Internet dominating the cell phone market in both products and services, it's not...