The Pioneer

Jane Po is determined to buy on the go -- no matter how difficult it is at times

By NICK WINGFIELD

BERKELEY, Calif. -- Jane Po settles into her train seat and removes a small leather pouch from her backpack. As the train glides out of the North Berkeley BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- station, Ms. Po unzips the pouch to reveal her Palm Vx handheld computer, and pops an antenna out of a slim black device attached to the back.

"You have to work fast," Ms. Po says.

The clock is ticking on Ms. Po's seemingly simple objective: to buy a book on Amazon.com Inc. from her Palm Vx, connected to the Internet through a wireless adapter made by OmniSky Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif. She has to move quickly because, for all but two brief interludes on her morning commute, the BART train is inside tunnels, where wireless service isn't available, as it barrels toward San Francisco.

Spotty wireless coverage is just one of many inconveniences that has stumped Ms. Po as she has attempted to take her heavy e-commerce habit on the go. She has to deal with related hassles, such as having to log in from scratch when she gets disconnected. And because of technical kinks, Ms. Po is unable to shop on some of her favorite Web sites. So, while she has become a mobile-information junkie, mobile commerce has been a disappointment.

M-commerce technology was supposed to be all about convenience, but it's often clumsy and unreliable. There remains much work to be done, such as making more Web sites mobile-enabled and improving coverage. Service is especially bad in places like trains and tunnels, where commuters cumulatively spend millions of hours of idle time and would otherwise be prime targets for m-commerce.

Tech Junkie

Ms. Po's efforts to become an m-commerce pioneer are worth looking at, because in many ways she is the ideal candidate for conversion to mobile commerce. A Web-site producer, Ms. Po, 42 years old, is the classic early adopter, part of that intrepid band of consumers who like to sample new technologies for the sake of sampling new technologies.

What's more, she is a compulsive online shopper. Ms. Po often trawls Internet auction sites looking to buy and sell computer gear, kitchen appliances and jewelry. Delivery trucks from Webvan Group Inc., the online grocer, make weekly trips to her Berkeley home. Until the recent carnage among Internet and technology stocks, she was a regular trader of stocks through E*Trade Group Inc., the Menlo Park, Calif., online brokerage firm. Ms. Po has done the vast majority of her online shopping through computers at work or home.

Jane Po: Hurry up and shop

Late last year, though, she decided she wanted something that would let her connect to the Internet when she was away from her desk. A laptop was out of the question -- too bulky for Ms. Po's taste. Another possibility was a Blackberry, the pager-size wireless e-mail device from Waterloo, Ontario-based Research In Motion Ltd. that is immensely popular in the dot-com world in which Ms. Po works. "But I'm not an e-mail junkie," she says.

Last November, Ms. Po spotted an advertising banner for OmniSky's wireless adapter on a Web site run by Cnet Networks Inc., the Internet media company she worked for at the time. Because the OmniSky device could attach to her Palm Vx organizer, Ms. Po decided to take the plunge. She bought the device for $299 and signed up for OmniSky's "beta program," a test period during which the company sought to work out technical kinks for the wireless service that connects OmniSky devices to the Internet. Service during the program was free for all beta testers (Ms. Po also ended up getting a $150 rebate on the device from OmniSky for its beta testers).

At first, there wasn't much commerce Ms. Po could do on her new gadget. Internet merchants, brokerage firms and other sites almost always require users to establish a secure connection using data-scrambling technology before they transmit their credit-card numbers or other sensitive information. In the first months after OmniSky started offering service, the devices didn't have the capability to make secure connections to Web sites. So instead, Ms. Po used the device religiously to check stock quotes, news headlines and other information when she was out of the house or office.

Buy, Sell, Buy

Then -- before the commercial launch of its service earlier this year -- OmniSky added the capability to log onto commerce sites securely. Ms. Po immediately began trading stocks from her Palm. While the value of her trades doesn't put her in the top ranks of day traders, she closely tracks the performance of her portfolio, trading shares when the impulse hits her -- though less often lately than she did initially. Connecting wirelessly to E*Trade, in theory, gives her a way to indulge her stock-trading habit from any location.

One October afternoon outside a popular Chinese restaurant in San Francisco's financial district, Ms. Po zigzagged down the sidewalk waving her Palm in the air to catch a wireless signal just so she could check her stock portfolio.

"I'm not a smart investor -- I play," Ms. Po says. "If I have enough for lunch money, I'm OK."

She has had some happy mobile-shopping experiences. Ms. Po purchased a book on Barnes & Noble.com and stereo headphones at an online electronics store. For Mother's Day, she bought her mom a bouquet online. She often checks eBay to see whether she has been outbid on various items, though she hasn't actually submitted a bid wirelessly.

Indeed, Ms. Po uses her wireless device most frequently -- and successfully -- for information access. She checks stock quotes and news headlines through her Palm. When she is lost in a city, she jumps to America Online Inc.'s MapQuest site to get directions to an address or to look up a restaurant phone number. At airports, she prefers to wirelessly surf the United Airlines site to check on flight delays rather than sauntering over to the scheduling monitors. She also frequently visits a site run by vVault Inc. that allows her to access and fax personal documents that she stores online.

But, as Ms. Po's sidewalk jig in search of a signal demonstrates, wireless coverage can be hit or miss. And Web junkies can find their pursuit of seamless Net surfing stymied by blind spots.

A case in point is Ms. Po's 35-minute BART ride to and from San Francisco, where she works for TechTV, a computer-oriented cable channel. Her commute is shared by legions of other wired workers, people from Berkeley, Oakland and the suburbs deeper into the East Bay who come to toil in San Francisco's high-tech economy -- the perfect captive audience for m-commerce.

But cellular phones and other wireless devices don't work during the long stretches that BART runs through tunnels -- which explains why Ms. Po is quickly preparing to connect to Amazon as her train leaves the underground North Berkeley station. Soon the train will shoot above ground for a few minutes between the Ashby and 19th Street Oakland stops, during which time she can make a connection. Then BART will dive into a tunnel again, emerging for about six minutes of more connection time before it descends into the tube beneath the floor of San Francisco Bay.

Above ground, with no time to lose, Ms. Po waves her OmniSky device around as though she is holding a Geiger counter scanning for radioactive material. "It's very spotty," she says of the signal.

As fellow commuters stare in curiosity, green lights begin flickering on the top of the OmniSky, indicating that she has a connection. Ms. Po uses a stylus to click on an icon for Amazon on her Palm, then pecks out her user name and password on a virtual keyboard that pops up on her screen. She stares expectantly at the screen as the device says it is signing onto Amazon.

Not fast enough. "We're about to lose the signal," she says, as the train plunges into a tunnel. She loses everything and will have to start from scratch logging in next time.

Bad Timing

Ms. Po is used to such frustrations. Earlier this year, she had a similar experience attempting to trade a stock. Before leaving the house, she flipped on CNBC -- part of her morning ritual -- and saw that shares of Digital Island Inc., an Internet stock she owned, were diving. She wanted out of the stock to lock in her profits. But she also wanted to make the 8:21 a.m. train to San Francisco so she could get to work on time. Ms. Po tried to dump 100 shares from her seat on the BART train, but OmniSky service pooped out before she could complete the transaction.

"I had to wait until I got to the office," she says. She estimates that by the time she finished the trade using her office PC, she had lost about $300 in gains she would have otherwise made on the investment.

Coverage beyond the train is better, but it's still unpredictable. Ms. Po says she gets great service in unlikely spots, such as the thick eucalyptus groves of the Berkeley hills, the San Francisco Bay Bridge and Hawaii (site of a past vacation). But wireless dead spots in cities are as common as potholes. On trips to Las Vegas, for instance, Ms. Po says she can't get a wireless signal in areas beyond the Strip.

OmniSky executives acknowledge that there are holes in the company's coverage, but they add that even cell-phone service in the U.S. has dead areas. The company emphasizes that the wireless network it uses is deployed in more than 100 metropolitan areas, with the notable exception of Atlanta. "Our users are generally very satisfied," says Barak Berkowitz, president of OmniSky.

OmniSky's wireless network is actually operated by a patchwork of different providers across the country, including AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and others. The company says it doesn't have much influence over where telecommunications companies deploy the network -- which runs on a technology called cellular digital packet data, or CDPD. "They haven't seen it as a priority in the BART tunnel," says Elan Amir, chief technology officer of OmniSky. "It's something they could do, but they haven't."

A spokesman for Verizon says the company has no plans to improve network coverage in specific train tunnels in the East Bay, but adds that Verizon is "absolutely committed to maintaining and improving our CDPD network, which is the best in the Bay area by far."

No Cookies

Part of Ms. Po's beef with wireless commerce is that some high-profile sites don't yet work through the service. She says she would shop more through OmniSky (for which she now pays a flat fee of $39 a month) if she could order groceries from Webvan, the grocery-delivery service. Ms. Po says she sometimes wishes she could log into her account on Webvan to modify orders that are waiting to be delivered to her home.

Sanjay Uppal, vice president of solutions engineering at Webvan, says the company intends to make its service available in the future on a variety of wireless devices, including the OmniSky product and cellular telephones.

Another Web favorite that isn't currently available over OmniSky is Kozmo Inc., a same-day delivery service for ice cream, CDs and other goodies. OmniSky's Mr. Amir says the current version of its Web browser doesn't support a software technology known as "cookies," a digital tag that automatically identifies users to a Web site. Some Web sites use cookies to help keep track of the items customers put into their online shopping carts before checkout. Mr. Amir says the cookie problem will be fixed in the next version of OmniSky's Web browser (OmniSky hasn't set a release date for the new browser). Currently, popular Web sites Ameritrade Inc., E*Trade, Buy.com Inc., Mercata Inc., Travelocity Inc., Barnes & Noble.com and others work through OmniSky, the company says.

Then there's the wipeout: In some instances, the interruptions in wireless service zap a user's log-on at a site, requiring consumers to repeat the password and user name when they get reconnected. That can be especially tedious on a wireless device's tiny screen. A number of sites have created programs with OmniSky that automate the sign-on process. Others like Amazon.com haven't yet created a program for OmniSky users, though an Amazon executive wouldn't rule out the possibility that the company would make one in the future.

Service is slow, too, with downloading speeds reminiscent of the glacial pace of early PC modems. The OmniSky device now transmits data at around 14.2 kilobits a second, about a quarter the speed of standard dial-up modems on PCs. OmniSky executives say that speed should jump to 64 kilobits a second within the next year. "It's clumsy because of its slowness," Ms. Po says. Mobile commerce is "for when you're desperate."

OmniSky's Mr. Berkowitz admits there's room for improving m-commerce. For now, he says he would grade mobile commerce a B or B-minus on the OmniSky device and a C on other devices.

One area he says the company is working on is streamlining certain functions so users don't have to tap or type on their screens as much. For instance, the company has been working on a feature with Travelocity that will allow users to book a plane ticket online directly from their Palm's calendar program. Once the flight is booked, the site will download the itinerary directly to the customer's calendar so they don't have to rekey all of the data.

Back on the BART train, Ms. Po has one last shot to connect to Amazon before the train ducks into a tunnel under San Francisco Bay. Her train cruises along a final stretch of open track, sun shining into the car as the San Francisco skyline comes into view. Ms. Po repeats the earlier ritual of waving her OmniSky device around. The device tries to connect to Amazon. She waits. And waits. And waits.

"Nope," she says. Her train disappears underground.

"I knew this was going to happen," Ms. Po says, putting her Palm and OmniSky away in her bag. "That's m-commerce for you."

-- Mr. Wingfield is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com