Hard Cell

What's more, Qualcomm itself had embarked on a sweeping restructuring, deciding to sell many operations and to focus mostly on the software and intellectual property that are the underpinnings of certain cell-phone networks. First Qualcomm sold its telecom-infrastructure business to Ericsson of Sweden. Then, in December 1999, Qualcomm agreed to sell its handset division, where Koerper and his team worked, to Japan's Kyocera. The transaction was completed two months later.

Suddenly, new owners wanted to scrutinize everything afresh, including the Smartphone project. Midlevel officials from Kyocera's Japanese labs came to San Diego for extensive briefings. Communication was handled mostly through interpreters, who translated everything the Americans said but passed along little except direct questions from the Japanese executives. At one briefing, Koerper produced a prototype of the Smartphone, hoping to impress his new bosses. No such luck. Across the conference table, Koerper could hear one Japanese executive muttering to another, "Okisugiru ne!"

Koerper wanted to snap back, "No it's not!" Partway through college, he had lived in Japan for a year and a half and had learned a good working knowledge of the language. He didn't need a translator to know the verdict: It's too darn big. For a moment, he wanted to argue the point -- to say that while tiny phones might be all the rage in Japan, his model was sized appropriately for the United States. But such a retort would be unspeakably rude. He hadn't even told his new bosses of his Japanese connection. There would be time for that later.

For the next few months, the Smartphone project was in official limbo. Project engineers kept making progress in their specific areas, but there was no clear sense of where the phone fit into Kyocera's plans. Originally, Koerper had hoped that the phone would be tested, approved, manufactured, and shipped in time for the Christmas 2000 selling season. But, as other Kyocera projects raced ahead and his didn't, Koerper knew that even in the best possible scenario, his phone wouldn't reach customers until early 2001.

To veteran engineers, the delays were especially ominous. Their dreams involved being part of a project that would catch the public's imagination and would sell by the millions -- giving them a taste of fame and glory within engineering circles. Their nightmares consisted of spending most of their thirties and forties on one doomed project after another, to the point that no one would consider them talented enough to deserve any more shots at the big time.

"It's on everyone's mind in engineering," recalls software developer Jeff Pritchard. "There's always hope at the beginning of a project, but it's hard to keep that hope alive in the middle, especially when you can see politics starting to intervene."

Etched into Pritchard's memory was a grim afternoon from 15 years earlier in his career, when he was working at Eastman Kodak Co. He had been pursuing an early version of digital photography for consumers, and he thought it had great promise. In a way, ultimately, he was right. But he learned over lunch that his project had just been canceled. An older engineer at the table got up, walked back to his desk, and came back with an elaborate set of calculations. "I've been here 11 years," the older engineer said, "and I've worked on 12 projects. Not one of them has ever shipped." For the rest of that afternoon, Pritchard recalls, the older engineer walked around crestfallen, "as if his dog had died."

Launch: "How Many of These Can You Make for Us?"

Just as anxiety reached dangerous levels within the Smartphone team, reasons for optimism emerged. Dean Fledderjohn, the business-development manager, called on Boeing, Ford, and other major corporations and found that they were strikingly upbeat about the Smartphone's potential. Meanwhile, Masahiro Inoue, the new president of Kyocera's San Diego outpost, took a prototype along with him on a Tokyo business trip in May 2000 -- and heard rave comments from some of the parent company's top executives. In fact, they commandeered his phone, demanding more samples.

By this time, Koerper could no longer hide his maneuvers to bypass Kyocera's test facilities and get the Smartphone evaluated elsewhere. But his bosses were ready to show a lenient side; if the new phone was likely to become a star product, there was no reason to reprimand its chief developer for his zeal.

In the most cheering sign of all, engineers who tried the phone outside Kyocera's premises found that utter strangers were spellbound by the device. Over a holiday weekend last summer, senior program manager Brett Kayzar whipped out a Smartphone to check his email in one of the passenger lounges at O'Hare airport. All around him, other business travelers were trying to do the same thing -- but their attempts were getting tangled up in an electrical maze of laptop computers, power adapters, modem cords, and the like.