recently walked through a mall with Ken Musante (from Humboldt Merchant Services), and we noticed a Nokia Center in the middle of the mall. It had Nokia's newest phone technology on display for all to see.

We inspected a number of the units, compared their features to those of phones offered by other manufacturers and discussed how they all fall into play with mobile commerce.

Is that a phone?

One of the most humorous things we experienced when looking over the phones was confusion about how certain models could even be phones. Some looked like pen boxes; others looked like they would fall apart if you touched them.

This leads up to how central simplicity is when dealing with merchants and mobile commerce. It's already tough to entice merchants to use mobile commerce and cellular phone payment. It becomes even more difficult when the phone itself is complex and confusing.

Given this, you may want to stay with a slightly older series of phones. For instance, Nokia has Series 40, 60 and 80, all of which have new models in the market. But the Series 40 phones are less complex than the series 80. The same can be said for Motorola's V-Series; V400 is less complex than V500.

Still not compatible

A common misconception is to think that if a phone is new, it has everything needed for mobile commerce processing. Unfortunately, even newer-model phones still aren't compatible in the mobile commerce market.

The U.S. market, in particular, has new phones constantly coming out that have been "cut down" from their European versions to suit the U.S. consumer. Features such as Bluetooth, strong data transfer and even camera pixels have either been taken out or lowered to cut the price on the phone.

These cuts result in phones that lack the capacity to enable mobile commerce, or phones that can employ mobile commerce software, but do not allow features like swiping, which restricts their use to keyed-only transactions. Lowered security encryption and elimination of data transfer, either through Bluetooth or serial connection, are the biggest problems to date.

Changes in the provider

It may surprise you to know that often a phone may not work with mobile commerce not because the manufacturer (like Nokia and Motorola) eliminates or replaces features, but because the cellular phone providers cut or disable them.

One example is the serial ports on T-Mobile V-Series Motorola phones. For mobile commerce, the serial connector is used as a communication port between the phone and the swiper/printer. T-Mobile has disabled the serial connector, so it doesn't allow any communication with outside devices.

Other providers carry the same or a comparable model (e.g., the V300 versus the V360), and their phone ports are open while T-Mobile's are not. When asked why the company locks its ports, a T-Mobile representative said it's done "for warranty reasons."

Things could be worse

With all this talk about incompatible phones and complex models, you might think the cell phone side of the mobile commerce market is too harsh and difficult to exploit. In reality, even with the array of models that don't work with mobile commerce, there are now more phones than ever before that do work.

I'm not trying to scare you away from mobile commerce; I'm trying to make it clear that though there are many, many mobile phones that are not equipped properly for mobile commerce, there are probably just as many that are.

Look for simplicity and compatibility, and check with the cellular providers and/or mobile commerce software vendors to see if the phone you're interested in will function in a mobile commerce environment.

Ben Goretsky is the Chief Executive Officer and head of IT Development at USA ePay. He has been working with his brother Alex since they started the company in 1998. E-mail him at ben@usaepay.com or call him at 866-872-3729, ext. 350.