Companies Try to Teach Old Phones New Tricks

COMPANIES TRY TO TEACH OLD PHONES NEW TRICKS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Amol Sharma amol.sharma@wsj.com and Jessica E. Vascellaro ]
In recent years, as phone companies have beefed up their cellphones with a steady stream of enhancements, innovations to the old land-line phone have been slow to come. But now, in a move largely designed to keep consumers from ditching land lines, phone companies are adding to home phones some of the features popular on mobile devices, like address books and text messaging. And equipment makers' latest home and office phones include a range of new features like in-home video baby monitoring, instant messaging, and access to email and the Web. The stakes are huge for the phone companies, especially those such as Embarq Corp., Qwest Communications International Inc. and Windstream Corp. that don't own their own wireless networks and are most susceptible to the increasing consumer shift away from traditional phones to cellphones. A recent survey by Harris Interactive Inc. found that 11% of U.S. adults use only their cellphones to make calls.
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