The Meat Of the Solution: Mobile Devices

From the now-ubiquitous Palm to screen phones, mobile computing devices come in a smorgasbord of shapes and sizes. Some devices are wireless transplants that have been upgraded to accommodate wireless technology, while others are appliances ready-made for the wireless world. Still, other devices--like the printer line from Hewlett-Packard, which will be entirely Bluetooth-enabled by the end of the year--aren't traditional clients at all.

Picking the right one for a solution involves matching the device to the application it's meant to serve. Understanding these devices requires an appreciation of the thinking that goes into them. Palm's chief competitive officer, Michael Mace, says Palm's devices are appliances, with a goal of an overall weight of less than 5 ounces and an architecture that promotes long battery life. Mace says his job focuses on instilling in his fellow employees a "can't do",the devices can't do tasks beyond the scope of a simple information appliance.

Mace runs through the Palm's limitations in a controlled rant that is almost hostile in its tone. The Palm V's operating system is "completely stone-age," he says. Bluetooth chips, meanwhile, are still too expensive to include as a standard feature, and Palm doesn't bundle a browser with its devices because wireless connections are too slow. "If you have the wind behind you, you get maybe a 24.8 connection," Mace says. "How does browsing at that speed feel? Well, it sucks. People won't do that."

Mace's job is to keep Palm focused on its specific market segment and to keep repeating the company's mantra that handhelds and PCs are like apples and oranges.

"These are not PCs," he says, gesturing at the Palm VII on the table."If the world treats us as an extension of the PC market, we will lose. We are not a notebook computer company."

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Other companies, including Casio, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, are marketing a plethora of devices that are, in essence, mini PCs (accounting for the "Pocket PC" name tagged onto devices running Microsoft's CE operating system). Those typically offer more upscale goodies than the Palm devices--color screens, small keyboards, greater memory and other laptop-like features. The devices deliver broader access to data than the Palm machines and display it in a more attractive manner, but they suffer battery life and weight penalties. And notebooks with wireless modems will factor into many solutions, especially those that incorporate a wireless LAN approach.

For pure data delivery, the mobile phone will be the most ubiquitous platform for the future. With millions of phones in use, and with the trend of users to purchase new phones every few years, these devices will provide a means for projecting technologies such as Bluetooth for wireless data into the mainstream. But their interfaces are small and come in a variety of shapes, which makes data display a challenge.

The future will be even more "wearable," to borrow Palm's term. IBM has demonstrated a prototype of the Watchpad, a wristwatch-sized wireless device based around a 640-x-480 VGA display. Such a variety of devices might at first seem distressing to the solution provider, but in reality "it opens up another aspect of the solution as an opportunity," says Sunil Gupta, director of new technology at Giant Step. "Choosing the right one is much easier once you understand what problem you are there to solve."