Sprint Pictures Leadership
Through Imaging

In the cutthroat business of mobile telecommunication services, Sprint PCS has consistently chosen to differentiate itself through technology leadership. Sprint built the nation’s first and still the only all-digital, nationwide wireless network from the ground up in 1995. It followed suit in the summer of 2002 by rolling out its PCS Vision service, with the slogan “Clarity You Can See and Hear.”

While PCS Vision relies on a convergent set of technologies – 3G speed, phones with color screens, and built-in applications including Java and WAP 2.0, what brings them all together and focuses the benefits in customers’ minds is, first and foremost, pictures.

“When we show potential customers that they can take a picture, transfer it to a phone, and send it to a colleague across the country, then the wide range of possibilities inherent in our advanced services really enters their imagination,” says Senior VP of Marketing Scott Relf.

This power of pictures to instantly communicate a concept is the key weapon Sprint has focused on, not only to demonstrate its technology leadership in wireless communication, but also to develop a whole new revenue stream based on the PCS Vision service and on a family of hardware devices that support it. These include a miniature digital camera that plugs directly into selected PCS Vision phones, new phones capable of displaying pictures in lifelike color, and cards that enable laptops, PDAs, and digital cameras to transmit images and other data wirelessly over the PCS Vision infrastructure. The experience Sprint has gathered in the recent past, indicates that business customers quickly grasp the benefits using infoimaging devices to  enable visual communication for mobile workers.

“We already understand that two screens — our television and our PC — have become an integral part of modern life,” says Relf. “We at Sprint believe the mobile handset is evolving into much more than a device for voice conversation — that it will in fact become the indispensable third screen. That is the business proposition Sprint is hanging its hat on, and nothing demonstrates it as clearly as the Pictures functionality in PCS Vision.”