Metrico Mobile Experience will provide monthly summary reports of the performance of various cellphones running both in lab tests and in tests conducted on carrier networks. The data should provide good comparisons both of the handsets tested and the networks on which they are tested.

Specifically the reports will detail performance on voice and data services. They will include data and Web-page download times, data throughput, dropped calls, performance in good and poor coverage areas and in quiet and noisy environments.

"We want to define objectively what end users will experience," said Rich McNally, vice president of information products at Metrico. "To date, the bulk of our business has been in confidential pre-launch testing of handsets, and our methods have been fairly rigorously reviewed by the industry," he said.

The service will cost $15,000 a year for reports issued monthly starting in July on a selection of new devices. It will compete with somewhat more subjective review services from a range of publications such as Consumer Reports and Engadget.com.

The service is designed to appeal both to Metrico's traditional customers such as carriers, handset and chip set makers as well as new customers including IT managers, retailers and consumers buying phones at retail shops. The service essentially opens to anyone the kind of data the company has been gathering to date on a proprietary basis for individual customers.

"We did a study for a European carrier a few months ago based on six GSM phones, showing dropped call rates with and without data services enabled," said McNally. "We could quickly get a metric, for example, about the statistical differences in services of say two or three different cities on a Verizon network," he said.

By: DocMemory
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