Sprint's Direct Connect Nothing to Call Home About

Back in the day -- around August 1993, I believe -- a communications company called Nextel hurled the techno asteroid of techno asteroids onto planet small biz. The company offered the means to speak directly -- and instantly -- with another mobile communicator as if both were on a walkie-talkie. Anytime. Anyplace.

Kerploow! Direct Connect, or push-to-talk, technology transformed the small business. Suddenly any group of schmoes -- myself included -- could morph into the 82nd Airborne, IBM IBM and Intel INTC all rolled into one. The technology was flat-out brilliant -- Direct Connect is a so-called "half duplex" communication technology, meaning you don't need a working symmetrical phone call to communicate.

The message is recorded, encoded, cached, delivered and decoded using technology developed by Motorola MOT.

Voice quality was almost absurdly clear. And DC could not be easier to use. No numbers. No messages. No chasing people down. Just beep the guy, and woe betide the soon-to-be former employee who did not beep back in five seconds or less.

It was ... glorious.

Nextel has fallen on hard times -- the company has been acquired by Sprint S with spectacularly middling results, and Verizon VZ now offers a similar product. But Direct Connect continues to fill a niche at Sprint. In 2007, the company said it hosted 90 billion push-to-talk connections, or about 300 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

And earlier this year, Sprint quietly announced it was adding some new features to the service. There would be push-to-send voice messages to any email, and a nifty-sounding push-to-send photograph service.

Romancing the Phone

So with my early '90s memories of UB-40 and Whitney Houston floating in my brain, I figured I would take a step back in small business techno-time. For the past few weeks, my assistant Nick and I have been testing the newfangled Direct Connect service -- with, honestly, middling results.

Sprint Nextel offers the service over various models. We tested the system using two new i580s made by Motorola. Nostalgia aside, I found the handsets to be a welcome relief to the clutterfest that is most cell phones today. The units were done in a black shock-proof rubber. They could be set up quickly and had a solid working man's professionalism to them. Big buttons, easy-to-use features and pristine push-to-talk call quality in the New York area (normal cell quality is another, grimmer story) made a strong argument for the product.

But the romance faded as we tested the email, photo and other new features.

Back to the Drawing Board?

The push-to-email amounted to nothing more than sending your recorded voice call as a link in an email. Yeah, it's cool, I suppose. And the messages arrived in a timely manner and played stably both on my Outlook and mobile Gmail accounts. But the inbound voice recording could only be responded to with a text message -- just like I would with any text message. So who needs Direct Connect for that? Just use your phone and SMS (short message service) the person. And worse, the transaction had to be set up beforehand online at NextMail.com. Waaaay not so slick.

The push-a-picture service was a bit more intriguing, if only a bit. I took an image with the i580. Then I had to save it, establish the direct connection, attach the picture to the direct message, and send it. Yes, I could send that pic faster than I would have with an average mobile messaging system. But not that much faster. And the camera in the i580 was hardly the best: One photo of a test phone Nick sent me was almost impossible to recognize. You are dealing with reference images at best.