Cordless e-mail phones to hit Europe

April 16, 2002

Three electronics giants have announced plans to sell fixed-line phones that can send and receive e-mail.

Panasonic, Philips and Siemens say they will first launch the cordless phones in Europe, where residents already send an estimated 30bn e-mails via their mobile phones. The companies have yet to reveal plans for the e-mail phones in the US, where about 94 per cent of homes have landline cordless phones.

The cordless phones would look almost exactly like their mobile counterparts, including a display screen.

But while some operators are hoping the phones can make up for lost revenue, some in the industry say the cordless phones’ limitations will make designing e-mail software difficult.

The landline phones typically have about 129 kilobytes worth of memory, while the most basic mobile phones have 10 times that. That is expected to make it difficult for software designers to create programs that store pre-set word lists in several languages, a popular function on mobile phones.