Personal Digital Assistants

I read with interest and fascination the excellent article on PDAs ("PDAs Arrive But Aren't Quite Here Yet," October 1993) written by Tom Halfhill. At the same time, I confess I was somewhat irritated by the absence of any reference to Psion. Psion has manufactured and sold well over 1 million hand-held/palmtop computers, which is superior to many of the other companies you cited.

One area of your comparison table where we strongly ally Hewlett-Packard is in the use of pen as an input device. It will be interesting to see which way the market jumps. Psion's view is that the pen is wholly inappropriate as an input device in the consumer sector. Today's pen technology cannot deliver the level of performance or satisfaction that an "early majority" customer demands. We shall see.

David Elder

President, Psion, Inc.

Concord, MA

Our story was about PDAs and was not intended to be a general survey of widely known PDA-like devices. Of course, you may disagree with our definition of a PDA. But we believe pens are already as good as miniature QWERTY keyboards for typical PDA functions--and pen interfaces are rapidly evolving, while keyboards are not.--Eds.

I want to talk to my Newton. As a loyal Apple consumer, I bought a MessagePad only to take it back two days later because it failed to live up to the Sculley promise of an easy-to-operate, do-it-all assistant. But if Apple could merge the Intelligent architecture of handwriting recognition and communications with the voice recognition of Mac AVs, I'd want to be put on the beta-user list. Perhaps Apple could accomplish this by decreasing the size of the DSP it uses for voice in Mac AVs to fit in the MessagePad. Imagine picking up your Newton and saying, "Newton, take a memo, blah, blah, blah. Newton, fax a memo to Mr. X." If the MessagePad could accomplish these commands wirelessly, it would be a true personal digital assistant.

William Bartee

Norman, OK