“You can get the Internet on that Phone?”: The Q-phone Launches, 1997
After my PDQ story a few weeks ago, a bunch of folks pinged me and said “how can you skip over the Q Phone”? So, now I’m back to 1997 again, reliving again some more of the best and worst times. The frenzy around the Q-Phone was up there.
So, what was this “Q Phone” I’m speaking of?
THIS WAS THE Q PHONE: 30 Seconds of video in the link below that NEEDS to be seen, allowing you shake your head in both disbelief and amazement if you were there, and say “WTF” if you are seeing this ad for the first time in 2021. Remember, this was 1997, TEN years before the iPhone. So, watch this 30-second YouTube link below for the Q Phone ad! And hopefully it will entice you to READ ON!
OK, if you didn’t click the link, this is what you missed!
“Recent reports of UFO sightings” “You can get the Internet on that phone?”“Email, stock quotes, it’s a pager too” ‘“Internet access coming soon”
With the classic close: “Weird guy, cool phone”. And yes, it is old Ferrari in the ad, as Paul Jacobs wanted a cool car, and Ferrari’s certainly fit the bill!
The story of the Q Phone and it’s launch in 1997 was a rocket ride only slightly less thrilling than Richard Branson’s ride to space last week, or Jeff Bezos’s flight this week. Except when it came to Qualcomm’s phone group, there was both the thrill of rocket liftoff, as well as some crashing and burning along the way.
And the flagship Rocket was the Q Phone.Warning this one’s a bit LONG, as there are memories I want to bring back, as well as some business lessons for folks today who may be paving the way with a new industry or product. But if wanna know, and if you enjoy ‘Belk Writing’, you will enjoy the story below.
Where we stumbled, where we were clueless, where we amazed, all are part of the story. And for the stories that I have from my side, others reading this…from R&D (esp Mechanical Engineering and Operations!), to Product Managers, to Sales, to Support, to Finance and Legal and our wireless Carriers partners…all no doubt have their OWN stories to tell!
The mid-90’s were the the beginnings of Cell Phone innovation and iteration. Phones went from giant bricks to new form factors, at that time lead by innovators like Motorola, NEC, and Panasonic. So, in 1996, Motorola introduced the “Star Tac” which was a small ‘flip phone’ that instantly became a best seller. As this article states, the Motorola Star Tac was the “must have” gadget of the mid-90's.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm was shipping it’s ‘candy bar’ phone, produced in its phone production joint venture with Sony, called the “QCP-800” (and later PCS version QCP-1900).
Paul Jacobs’s response, as then President of Qualcomm Consumer Products (QCP)…in and around mid-end 1996 — Let’s do a MOON SHOT, and do a CDMA digital version of a folding phone, one that will be lightweight, use the latest battery technology, and leverage Qualcomm’s CDMA technology for great voice quality, battery life, and INTERNET access, all unheard of in a small digital device of the time.
A couple of tricks here however. It was a STEALTH project, which meant that the R&D engineers, product managers, supply chain, operations, finance folks, sales, and people on my marketing team had to keep all plans, budgets and activities segmented. I couldn’t even put projected Q phone activities and budgets into my marketing plan at the time! Which was really tricky, as it’s not like we had decades of experience building phones, especially phones built on a totally nascent underlying CDMA wireless technology. Most of us were in our early to mid-30’s, we were cocky, we had our mission, and we blissfully didn’t know what we didn’t know. And the MISSION was to to LAUNCH the Q-phone rocket at the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) Trade Show in March of 1997.
Just a FEW of the challenges:
R&D and Product Management: My launch track was complicated enough, but in retrospect, anything in my marketing team’s world was a simple microcosm compared to engineering and wrangling the Q phone to launch. There were other folding phones like Mot’s or NEC, but they used Analog and GSM as their air interface, and had R&D/supply chains etc that were much more mature than anything that Qualcomm could access at the time for their CDMA phone. EVERYTHING was a trade-off weight/battery (new li-ion batteries!)/talk time/standby time. What type of screen vs. abilty to show data/text. Features/Specs, and a goal to have the thing pocketable and light.
Suppliers were still figuring out how to make components for the larger CDMA phones, and reducing the form factor dramatically…ugh. Especially RF / RF front end components. Expensive, long lead time, lots of uncertainty.
Mechanical Engineering: The case, that really cool sleek industrial design? This was the part of nightmares. A folding phone, with hinges, flex connectors, unproven plastics/molds, assumptions about folding pressures, environmental impacts, and how folks might torque/drop/use and abuse.
Finance and Operations: Costing, sourcing, figuring out how many we were going to build, HOW we were going build and test. Reconfiguring manufacturing lines (did I mention the Manufacturing was in La Jolla, California?) to produce a complicated, expensive Flagship phone in much lower volumes than other QCP phones of the time.
Selling and Channels: Who the heck was gonna buy them, how many were they gonna buy, and how much would they pay for them, and how could carrier Salesfolks be trained to understand the differentiation of the Q Phone’s innovations?
A myriad of other issues. Tons of new software in the phone, to support new data features, a completely new UI for a bigger screen, support, documentation. The list went on and on. And on.
And then there were my team’s Marketing and launch piece (again, my side’s challenges were DWARFED by the challenges above, in retrospect we had the fun stuff). I was given the mission to LAUNCH in a big way, but do it secretly. Launch marketing plans, vendors, packaging, product documentation, point of purchase materials, training docs, out-of-box focus groups, TV and print ads, trade shows, PR, analyst outreach. Trying to stay aligned with Product Management folks who were going a mile a minute and dealing with their own linked crises, and where any changes/crises they needed to handle daily rippled upstream to R&D and downstream to my shop.
An example. We needed a name! I engaged InterBrand, the world’s pre-eminent product and company naming organization. We had seemingly infinite meetings on finding the right type of name that would capture the scale of innovation that would be inside the Q phone. We slowly whittled down to a list of names. We had focus groups to see how folks would respond to the names. Which is tricky (I HATE NAMING!) as not only does the name have to be available, but it can’t mean anything bad in another language or culture.
Finally, we HAD a name! It passed legal. It passed trademark, the focus groups loved it. We had a name for launch. DONE?
NOPE.
We WERE done…at least until the point where Paul Jacobs came into my office, erased a part of my Whiteboard near the door, wrote the letter “Q” on the white board, underlined the letter “Q” and said “we’re gonna call it the Q Phone”, turned round, walked out, and closed the door behind him. And that was that. As much as I hate admitting this then or decades later…he was right.
We had our date for Launch, March 1997, and needed to make a splash. So, how to you make a splash around a phone called the “Q Phone” and it’s “Data” capabilities? Well, how about engaging John DeLancie, who played Q on Star Trek Next Generation, and Brent Spiner, who played Data?
And finally, on March 3rd, 1997, the Q phone Launched! Here is the press release. “An extraordinary Palm Sized Digital PCS Phone”…that’s alot of adjectives for one small phone!
And maybe the coolest point of purchase phone packaging that’s ever been attempted?
Then the Rocket Ride continued. We launched at CTIA in San Francisco, March 3rd, 1997. LOTS of noise and attention. The surprise was near complete, the press conference memorable with both John DeLancie and Brent Spiner there, but the real star was the phone. Small, sleek, a hinge that made you want to open and close it, again and again. And again. Maybe the BEST audio quality of any phone that anyone had ever touched or heard. Texting, paging. The “internet access coming soon”?…sorta stayed that way…i.e. “coming soon”.
Then came the Kurfuffles. Paramount came after us because we engaged John DeLancie and Brett Spiner (but did not use any of their “imagery”). Motorola filed a lawsuit because we made a phone that folded. A really cool phone that folded. Although there were other phones around the world that folded, and the idea of a folding phone wasn’t all that unique, the lawyers got busy. That one took a while, but the lawsuit ultimately got thrown out of court for a myriad of reasons.
For my team and I, the Q Phone launch was a blast, as it was the flagship that we used to do an even broader launch of the Qualcomm Brand, and use the ‘mystique’ of the phone for Qualcomm’s first national marketing campaign, as described here.
The Q phone story changed over the months and year past the launch. Like many things in Qualcomm’s phone building adventures, it was a learning experience, to say the least. It was launched, but now we had to BUILD and SHIP. Paul Jacobs, along with his management team like myself and others, did an amazing job given the technology and time constraints, but again, we were mainly a bunch of kids in our early to mid 30’s (I was 34 at the time). For want of a better description, we were not clueless, we were bright and driven, with great teams, but we didn’t know what we did not know, and in retrospect could have used a few more “seasoned” folks around us. But that DID NOT matter then. If nobody tells you it’s impossible, the only thing to do is to try. Really hard. Even if you might be thinking to yourself “oh, S***!!!” about twenty times a day.
Remember those supply chains? Tough, long, with lots of Quality Assurance issues. Remember that really cool industrial design and mechanical design? We had to build, rebuild, retool molds to keep the hinges from cracking during use. We had to sell the phones, support the phones. We had to try and get the “internet access coming soon” to be “internet access now”, but the networks were challenging, and even more importantly, we learned that having a four line by twelve character screen (48 character phone screens were LARGE for the time!) made it difficult to compose or send emails! Remember the “networks, devices, and applications” description of my PDQ article? Same thing. Operations had to find parts, develop processes for building an testing and driving towards acceptable yield levels. Plus, the Q phones had to be qualified by the FCC and go through rigorous carrier network acceptance testing before we could ship a single phone!
What’s interesting about the Q Phone, and other phones of the era it it was a battle to SHRINK the phones. This is a story that I will continue in another article (hopefully shorter), but at the time, the news was that SMALL phones would allow folks to carry them in their pockets, a new concept at the time, with the radical though being that if folks had their phones in their phones and purses, if they had longer battery life, if the voice quality was really sharp…well than maybe folks would use them MORE, an outcome which wireless Carriers would LOVE as well.
As RCR Wireless Magazine said in March of 1997 about the Q phone launch:
“TECHNOLOGY NOW A DIFFERENTIATOR IN BATTLE OF SMALLEST PHONES. “The world’s smallest PCS phone.” “The world’s lightest mobile phone.” “The smallest and lightest CDMA phone in existence.”
“The battle for the tiniest phone is no longer just a matter of shape and size. The technological standard used by the phone is now a clear differentiator.The new Q phone by Qualcomm Inc. doesn’t claim to be the smallest phone-it claims to be the smallest phone for Code Division Multiple Access technology”
Although part of another story, this was PART of what was going to become the “technology wars” between GSM andCDMA, (remember the NETWORK part of the “Networks, Device, and Applications” equation). Additionally, the Q Phone and other like it became the harbinger of “shrinkage”, of packing more and more capability into devices…only to have them grow again to the somewhat consistent size and weight of the Smartphones we carry today. At least until Augmented Reality (AR) form factors and devices show up and blow it all up again, but that’s another story for the future.
So what happened to the Q phone? It was a nightmare to build, from a mechanical design it was a challenge to keep in one piece, as we used to joke the that Q phone should be priced at “$100 per crack” as there always seemed to be a bunch of non-critical cosmetic cracking, especially in the problematic hinges. Like other things Qualcomm of that era, it was more and less than we wanted. As I described around the PDQ, we were in the Phone game to grow and win, but when you have too many adjectives in your device description: “Most advanced Palm Sized digital PCS phone”, it’s sort of the opposite direction from where the iPhone or Galaxy’s would take us.
Ultimately though, the strange guy peering into the Ferrari in the TV Spot summed it up best…the Q Phone was a REALLY “COOL PHONE”.
For me, and my guess pretty much anyone else from that time and place…no regrets, and would not trade those times for anything.
Lessons learned:
- Claim a space and don’t be shy
- Make it cool and be proud of the cool
- If you are building stuff, mechanical design matters
- If you are building stuff, making it buildable matters
- Nine people can’t make a baby in one month…especially if they’ve never made a baby before
- Don’t have too many adjectives to describe your market segment
- Cool for consumer devices can be necessary, but in this case, was not sufficient
- Like love for your kids or family, the amount of effort that teams and individuals can put into an impassioned product launch is near unlimited
- And as I’ve mentioned, don’t build volume consumer electronics in La Jolla, California!
Finally, if you have made it this far, a few words about me. I sort of assumed that everyone knew who I was, and many do, but I didn’t introduce myself in my first few articles. I’m Jeff Belk, and I’m the guy who launched the Qualcomm brand to the world in the mid/late 90’s, and who headed marketing/global comms for Qualcomm from most of the period from 1996 til 2006, including for Qualcomm’s phone group from launch of its first phone, to the time of the sale of the phone division, and then through the “technology wars” and beyond. Professionally for me it was a remarkable time, where I was empowered to grow from a team of six in San Diego to the buildout and hiring of a superb global marketing team of 100+ people and agencies around the world, with commensurate global plans and budgets, topped by the craziness of two Superbowl’s in Qualcomm’s hometown of San Diego, including the 1998 Superbowl at the newly renamed “Qualcomm Stadium”.
Many of that team is still at Qualcomm, as well as in key roles around the wireless industry. To say that all of us felt we were working to change the world might seem like hyperbole to some today, but frankly, IMHO, I don’t think so, and my guess others would agree.
So, for current Qualcomm folks or more Qualcomm alumni like myself, it would be GREAT to hear some of your stories around the Q Phone! So don’t be shy…
Jeff Belk