DESKTOP PHONES SOON TO WISE UP

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 13, 1992                   TAG: 9202130100
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium
DESKTOP PHONES SOON TO WISE UP
They have been compared to the Trojan horse - a way of sneaking a computer, disguised as a telephone, onto every desktop in America.
Screen-based telephones, as they're known generically - or Smart Phone, as American Telephone & Telegraph Co. calls the prototype it unveiled late last year - are quietly rolling up to the city gates. The phones display text and graphics and can be used for anything from at-home banking to letting you know who is on call-waiting when you're talking on the other line.
Bellcore, the research and development arm of the regional telephone companies, is set to release a sweeping set of proposed standards that will make it easy for manufacturers to start producing plug-in-anywhere, screen-based phones. The open protocols will also help information providers, who will have a "map" of how the new phones will look so they can tailor new services to them.
In importance to the telecommunications industry, "this is an eight or nine" on a scale of one to 10, said Joshua Harris, president of Jupiter Communications, a New York consulting firm that tracks the phone companies and information services. "Nothing else has happened that really compares to this, in our opinion."
Harris, who also publishes a newsletter, said Bellcore's move will prompt an onslaught of $200, screen-based telephones that will begin showing up in stores by late summer.
The Smart Phone and other models won't be able to show images of callers on their screens, unlike the $1,500 videophone AT&T introduced last month, but it will have many other capabilities.
Ronda Potter, a Bellcore researcher, said the proposed standard envisions screen-based telephones that have eight keys flanking the screen. The keys' functions are not defined; that's left up to the individual information provider.
The phones will also be immediately useful for many of the voice-driven "audiotext services." Railroads, for example, instead of leading a caller through a voice-prompted hunt-and-peck tour of touch-tone buttons, could simply list schedule and fare information on the phone's screen.
And soon, phone companies will offer directory assistance and yellow pages that will allow users to shop for items over the telephone.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB