Real Soon Now
Oct 16 '00 (Updated Jun 14 '02)
The Bottom Line Still waiting.
Okay, it's almost two years later. Has anything changed? Not really. We have three solutions on the market now, phones that can store contact information, PDAs with headsets and portable email devices with contact info and headsets. They fail the shirt pocket test. Most still rely on the number pad for data entry. Those that don't fall in the third category (the Blackberry and the Nokia 9290) are way too big to carry everywhere you go.
In other words, we're still waiting.
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This is still an immature market segment. It reminds me of the history of pen-based computing, an issue which first hit my desk in 1989 or 1990. The trade weeklies were full of projections of widespread adoption in five more years. Sturm and Drang regarding Microsoft's pen-based OS was all the rage. Go Computing was going to revolutionize the industry.
And all the products sucked. The OSes were slow and unstable. The products were bulky and terrible at handwriting recognition. The Newton came the closest to a usable product, but there were all kinds of problems with it as a real consumer device.
Then came the Palm Pilot. It fit in a shirt pocket. It gave up on the idea of the computer learning your handwriting; instead you learned its handwriting. It synched with your desktop. And it had all the key applications people really wanted on board, out of the box.
In the integrated phone/pda marketplace, we're still pre-Newton. The Palm design looks obvious to us now, but it took years to get there. The hurdles facing an integrated device are higher than either device faced alone. A phone keypad is a terrible text entry device. A phone screen is too small to present much information. It's low resolution and black and white to boot. People want their phones to be as small as possible, while they want their pdas to present a useful quantity of information.
We don't know what the product will look like when it's released, but we'll know it when we see it. It may require voice recognition and it may speak content instead of displaying it. If that's the case, it's gonna be a long wait. It may include a heads-up display, like the guy in the ad buying and selling commodities while feeding pigeons somewhere in Europe. Nobody knows. Believe me, though, if you buy a first generation product, you won't keep it long.
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Epinions.com ID:
JayAckroyd
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Member: Jay Ackroyd
Location: New York NY
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 0 members
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