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Future of Wireless Communication and Fashion on Display in New Orleans

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NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: The future of wireless communication is the topic today at an industry conference in New Orleans, and this apparently not just any old conference. It features speakers from Bill Gates to Nelson Mandela, and an amazing array of all the new communication devices that you and I will probably be using one day very soon.

And CNN's Rick Lockridge is covering for us. He joins us from New Orleans.

Rick, hello.

RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Hello there.

Well, you're right about the big array of stuff. We're going to show some of it to you in a moment. But first of all, how about the array of exhibitors behind me here at the convention center in New Orleans, all here, all of these hundreds of exhibitors and developers here to try to figure out how to stuff the entire Worldwide Web into a cellular phone or a pager or a personal digital assistant. And one way they're going to do that with the so-called WAP phones.

And to talk about WAP phones with me is Denise Webb (ph) of Motorola.

Come on in.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How are you?

LOCKRIDGE: Motorola has a few WAP phones on the market, so tell us -- and here they are -- tell us what a WAP phone is and what does WAP mean.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. WAP stands for wireless applications protocol, and what it does is it takes the things that you care about on the Web, streamlines them so they makes sense on a phone, because the displays, even though we're -- we have phones where the displays are getting larger, and they will over time, you can't surf the Web on a phone. So it's called, what information do I want, that makes sense to me in this kind of a display?

LOCKRIDGE: Can we make it do something, here, while we're looking at it, surf somewhere? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Let's see.

LOCKRIDGE: And meanwhile, tell us what these phones cost in terms of low end to high end. Oh, and let's just leave it here where they can see this.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Whoops, I'm sorry. OK.

This phone is anywhere from three to 599, depending on the carrier. So, we don't control that. This one goes for about 299, again, depending on the carrier, and this is around $200. And so what you're seeing also is different form factors, and you can make calls off of all of them. (OFF-MIKE)

LOCKRIDGE: Well, you know, what, we didn't see it browse anything, but does have a nice color display. That's the beauty of live television. Denise, thanks for coming in.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're welcome.

LOCKRIDGE: Another phone I'd like to show you is the MP3 phone by Samsung, and this phone is unique among cellular phones in that it can play digital music files, MP3 files, that you can download off the Web on your computer and then put onto the 64 megabytes of built-in flash memory that are on this phone. I'm going to try to play a song for you. First of all, I want to make sure it's playing. And I'll hold it up to my microphone and hopefully you'll be able to hear that a little bit back there in Atlanta and around the world. You can play this MP3 player in your car or wherever you are, and when a phone call comes in it interrupts the music, you take the phone call, then you go back to music after that.

Now, with an estimated half a billion of us using wireless devices by the year 2003, we're going to need some fashion accessories to look a little less geeky out there in the world, and to show us some of those is Melissa from Body Glove.

Come on in Melissa.

And we have here arrayed in front of us a bunch of these fashion accessories, and also on Melissa herself, that you can have to try to look a little more stylish. She's wearing here that they call the ear glove by Body Glove -- that's about $25 -- and that will help you listen and talk on the phone without having to use your hands. And then she's also got here one of these pouches on her arm to hold her phone if she's going to be jogging or walking on the beach, which you like you're ready to do. And on the belt we have the little cell phone holder, and you can see here they come in all sorts of colors, and the prices start at about $20 and go on up from there.

And I think we're going to have to look into that, Natalie. I've got a couple of my own clunky devices here, a cell phone and an old pager, and I'm going to try to dress those up by the time the day is over. Back to you.

ALLEN: Yes, you need to look better standing next to Melissa, there. OK, Rick Lockridge, thanks so much.

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