Slowly but surely, PDAs are evolving into useful business tools. High prices and an inadequate wireless infrastructure remain obstacles.
Michael Nadeau
Call them what you like--PDAs (personal digital assistants), personal communicators, organizers, palmtops, or hand-held PCs--but sooner or later, you'll almost certainly be using a small computing device to communicate and manage information. Even today, in what might be considered the primeval era of PDAs, they help thousands of users keep track of schedules, maintain to-do lists, and serve as mobile nodes for exchanging data in remote locations. Mobile workers are using PDAs to gather sales statistics, retrieve information from on-line databases, and keep in touch with their home offices via paging services or even cellular phone networks.
So why, after years on
the market, have PDAs failed to take the world by storm? Unfortunately, they are still products of an immature technology. While they can perform the above tasks and more, they're relatively inefficient, or prohibitively expensive, or both. Some companies that were planning to introduce PDAs have postponed their projects, and others (e.g., Eo) have vanished from the market.
But the good news is that PDAs are evolving rapidly. Prices for both systems and services are dropping. User interfaces and hardware designs are growing better suited for important tasks. Desktop connectivity--which was at first almost nonexistent--is widely available and much more sophisticated. Battery life is improving. More development tools are available and software is multiplying. Perhaps most significantly, wireless communications services are becoming more affordable and widespread.
Cost Controls
Today, price is still a major barrier to the proliferation of PDAs. A general-purpose PDA with in
tegrated land-line and wireless modems will cost you $1000 to $1500. That's not cheap, but nearly two years ago such a device (the Eo Personal Communicator 440) cost nearly $3000.
Personal organizers have dropped in price as well. The street price of the Casio Z-7000, for example, has dipped from $700 to $400. The industry consensus is that sales will surge when prices hit between $600 and $700 for a device with two-way wireless communications and between $200 and $300 for a less communicative PDA.
A few key components are keeping PDA prices high. LCD screens are a relatively costly item--as much as $30 per unit. Because each PDA requires its own unique display, vendors can't take advantage of the economies of scale that notebook vendors enjoy. After the LCD, the most expensive component in a PDA is usually RAM. The less memory the PDA needs, the more control its designers have over system cost and size. For this reason, many PDA applications and some OSes are written in assembly language to con
serve as much memory as possible.
The purchase price of a PDA often pales, however, when compared to the user's long-term cost of subscribing to a wireless communications service. RadioMail (San Mateo, CA), a provider of E-mail and other wireless services, charges $39 to $139 per month for access to the Ardis radio network. The lowest fee in that range allows you to send up to 100 messages of 240 characters each per month. Additional messages cost 21 to 36 cents each.
If you add paging services, connections to on-line services such as CompuServe, or access to information downloads such as stock quotes, your monthly bill escalates. On the bright side, many of these services were unavailable or more expensive when PDAs first appeared a few years ago.
Form Follows Function
PDAs are very diversified, and they'll probably become more so in the future, although this is a matter of debate. Some observers think each important function will spawn its own small, inexpensive
, specialized device. Others believe that improved technology and economies of scale will eventually allow a few general-purpose PDAs to adequately and cost-effectively perform many different tasks.
"Each hardware manufacturer has different ideas about what they want to build," says Gordon Mayer, CEO of GeoWorks (Alameda, CA), which supplies GEOS to several PDA vendors. Those ideas seem to depend on the historical hardware and application focus of the company (see the table
"The Wide Variety of PDAs"
).
For instance, Motorola (Schaumburg, IL) is a leading communications company, so it's no surprise that its Envoy and Marco systems emphasize E-mail and wireless connectivity. Cellular-phone vendor Nokia (Salo, Finland), which recently bought a stake in GeoWorks, is planning several cellular-based PDA-like products for the consumer and business markets.
Communications-based devices such as the Marco are expensive ($1000 or more) and are aimed at a relatively small group o
f business users. The personal organizer applications they include have a strong slant toward communications. For instance, the Magic Cap software from General Magic (Sunnyvale, CA) can automatically pull E-mail information from its address book when you send a wireless message.
Large Japanese consumer-electronics companies (e.g., Sharp and Casio) tend to sell devices that emphasize universal tasks, such as scheduling, note-taking, and to-do lists, instead of wireless communications. Their personal organizers offer nearly all the communications options of, say, Motorola's Envoy, but only as relatively expensive add-ons that seem more like an afterthought. For the most part, these organizers are not as versatile as the PDAs from Apple (Cupertino, CA), Sony, Motorola, and a few other vendors.
Traditional computer companies like Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA) tend to place a higher priority on making their hand-held devices compatible with desktop PCs. The HP 200LX has a QWERTY keyboard, uses MS-D
OS, and comes with the LapLink file transfer utility from Traveling Software (Bothell, WA). A full range of communications options is also available.
Expect many more variations of these basic archetypes to appear in years to come. What you won't likely see are many PDAs larger than the currently available offerings. "People want products that look like a notebook [PC] or something you hold in your hand," says Ken Dulaney, an analyst with the Gartner Group (Santa Clara, CA).
Tweaking the User Interface
These varied approaches to hardware design and basic functions also dictate the limits of the user interface. Ideally, perhaps, users wouldn't have to confront more than one general type of interface on the different computers they use. But it is proving impractical to design a common user interface that's scalable from small pocket-size devices to larger hand-held units to full-size desktop systems. Some vendors, such as Apple, strongly believe it's preferable not to try-
-it's better to design a fresh interface that's optimized for PDAs rather than cling to desktop standards that are more appropriate to large screens.
Even among small mobile devices, however, there's enough variety to make user-interface design a challenge. An interface that works on a palm-size PDA might fail on a pocket-size pager.
Microsoft (Redmond, WA) has been struggling for years to make a version of Windows that fits on a PDA. That project, known as WinPad, is on a back burner. Attention has shifted to object-oriented OSes such as GeoWork's GEOS, Apple's Newton Intelligence, and General Magic's Magic Cap, which are inherently suited to small devices.
For one thing, these OSes are more modular, so the user interface can be modified for different classes of devices or vertical markets without rewriting other parts of the OS. Changing the interface of a conventional desktop OS requires either a major overhaul or the addition of a shell program--not a desirable alternative for PDAs, w
here memory is at a premium.
GEOS goes the farthest in decoupling the user interface from the underlying kernel. It supports a generic interface, which is common to all GEOS applications, and a specific interface, which is left to the discretion of the developer. An abstraction layer separates and translates between these two interfaces. Mayer calls this "the most innovative piece of our technology."
Magic Cap's pictorial user interface will not scale down as easily to small pocket-size devices. The Newton's emphasis on handwriting recognition similarly limits its scalability (although the latest Newton applications rely less and less on freehand text entry). Both interfaces are more easily scaled upward; in fact, General Magic has announced plans for a Windows version of Magic Cap.
User interface design for PDAs is closely intertwined with the method of user input. Styluses are fairly standard, but for now, PDA vendors are avoiding handwriting recognition. Not only is it too unreliable,
but the recognition engines also tend to hog processing power and memory. One promising alternative, however, is a recognition engine called Graffiti from Palm Computing (Los Altos, CA). Graffiti is available for Newton, Magic Cap, and GEOS systems (see "Rewriting Handwriting Recognition").
Connecting to the Desktop
Every PDA vendor is beefing up its desktop connectivity in response to user demand. "By far, the most important kind of communications is to talk to the desktop conveniently," says Randy Palmer, U.S. product manager for palmtops at HP.
Virtually all PDAs provide some means of exchanging files with PCs or Macs, but few provide this capability as a standard feature. That's not likely to change soon. Although many users want desktop connectivity, others avoid it and "dedicate a certain task to a certain device," says the Gartner Group's Dulaney. Adding file transfer features to PDAs to accommodate some users would increase prices and consume precious memory for
all.
Even when the desktop connectivity gap is bridged, users face the problem of data synchronization. Most people want desktop connectivity as a means of simplifying data input; it's easier, for instance, to enter names and addresses into a card file with a desktop keyboard than with a stylus or a tiny PDA keyboard. But later, when you're on the road, you'll probably add some new records to the address book on the PDA. Now you've got two different versions of your address book--one on the PDA, and another back home on the desktop. Somehow you've got to synchronize the data.
As more businesses deploy PDAs among their mobile workers, group tasks such as scheduling and updating sales reports will become increasingly important. To avert chaos, everyone has to be working with the latest version of the schedule or the database. So PDA vendors and developers are working on better file transfer and data-synchronization tools.
For example, Psion (Concord, MA) is introducing PsiWin software for t
he Psion Series 3a Palmtop computer. The Palmtop files appear in their own volume on the Windows desktop, and you can transfer files by dragging and dropping.
Expected to ship in May, Psion's PsiWin will include many file translators for preserving attributes while transferring Psion files to many word processor, spreadsheet, database, or scheduling applications. PsiWin will also include a Windows PC version of the Series 3a's data application, which will let you create entries using the PC's full-size keyboard and transfer them into your Psion Palmtop. In a future release, Psion plans to add a Hot Thinking feature to automatically reconcile data within the files.
IntelliLink's (Nashua, NH) IntelliLink connectivity software has a similar feature that offers a graceful way to resolve duplicate agenda appointments: IntelliLink lets you send data between your desktop PC and PDA at the file level. IntelliLink supports several PDAs, including ones from Casio, HP, Psion, Tandy, and Sharp.
If yo
ur PDA and desktop machine have PCMCIA PC Card slots, you could solve this problem merely by swapping storage cards back and forth. Intelligent driver software could perform any necessary file conversions, and your PDA data would appear as just another hard drive on your desktop. Several vendors make PC Card cages that work with desktop PCs.
Extending Battery Life
Another challenge is building a PDA that can run for days or weeks on a fresh set of batteries. But measuring a PDA's battery life is tricky. People don't use PDAs like desktop computers; they tend to turn portable devices on and off more frequently, using them for brief periods of time. It makes little difference, therefore, whether a device gets 10, 50, or even 100 hours of continuous use. What does matter, says GeoWorks' Mayer, is that users get "unconscious" battery life. In other words, the PDA must run long enough so that users can recharge or replace the batteries at convenient, regular intervals.
Most P
DAs sold today have backup batteries that preserve stored information even when the device is turned off. But adding components such as radio modems, cellular phones, or pagers can drain the main batteries much more quickly. Better power management is still a top design goal.
New battery technologies such as the optional lithium-ion cells in Sony's PIC-1000 are part of the answer, but what's more important is designing hardware that's less power hungry. "Power management is a distinctive art," says Mike Lundgren, U.S. market development manager at Apple's PIE (Personal Interactive Electronics) division. That art includes higher integration of system logic into ASICs, lower-power components, and better power management software (see "Brainy, Brawny Batteries").
CPUs are doing their part, too. Motorola's Dragon I 68349 CPU draws only 300 milliwatts of power at 16 MHz; when idle, its power consumption drops to under 1 mW. Casio's Z-7000 uses an 8086-class processor and provides excellent battery li
fe--although it has been widely criticized for its poor performance.
One remaining obstacle is that Type II PC Cards and controllers are 5-V components, but most PDAs use 3.3-V parts. A 3.3-V PCMCIA design is in the works, but PDAs that use them are at least a generation or two away.
Communications: The Driving Force
Most people agree that the key ingredient in moving PDAs into the corporate big leagues is two-way wireless communication. As mentioned before, the relatively high cost of wireless service is still an issue. However, the removal of other barriers could render this moot. Those barriers include a confusing lack of wireless standards, an incomplete wireless infrastructure, and no critical mass of wireless devices (see "Radio Days").
Wireless data transmission methods range from analog and digital cellular to several flavors of packet radio, with satellite microwave on the horizon. No PDA vendor is betting the farm on any one of them. Motorola comes close
st with its hefty investment in the Ardis packet radio network, but the Marco and the Envoy can accommodate virtually any wireless transport. The universal strategy is to support every form of wireless (usually with third-party options) while keeping the hardware and system software flexible.
No wireless system as yet offers full coverage of the U.S., and the dream of a unified, global wireless infrastructure is years (perhaps decades) away. This forces some users to choose a wireless service based on availability rather than features or price.
PDAs that support two-way wireless communications will become more viable as more of them enter the field. It's similar to the burgeoning popularity of cellular phones; as more people use them and become more reachable away from their regular phones, there's more reason for other people to go cellular. The same thing will happen when more people become reachable via E-mail on their wireless PDAs.
The next communications feature likely to be built i
nto PDAs, according to several sources, is two-way paging. Dulaney estimates the cost of goods to the manufacturer at about $25, which translates into an additional $75 in the retail price of a PDA. He believes that the added functionality would more than make up for the additional cost: "[Paging] is more valuable than [bundling Lotus] 1-2-3."
When will all these pieces come together so that PDAs can enter the business mainstream? Vendors are optimistically predicting this will happen in 1996 or 1997. But Dulaney expects them to flounder for at least the next three years. During that time, he expects OSes and hardware to mature to the point where PDAs can finally meet the expectations of most users.
WHERE TO FIND
Apple Computer, Inc.
Cupertino, CA
(800) 538-9696
(408) 996-1010
Ardis Co.
Lincolnshire, IL
(800) 652-7347
(317) 843-9375
Casio, Inc.
Dover, NJ
(20
1) 361-5400
fax: (201) 361-3819
Fujitsu Personal
Systems, Inc.
Santa Clara, CA
(800) 831-3183
(408) 982-9500
fax: (408) 496-0609
General Magic
Sunnyvale, CA
(408) 774-4000
fax: (408) 774-4010
GeoWorks
Alameda, CA
(510) 814-1660
fax: (510) 814-4250
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Corvallis, OR
(800) 443-1254
IntelliLink
Nashua, NH
(603) 888-0666
Motorola Wireless Data Group
Schaumburg, IL
(800) 894-7353
Palm Computing, Inc.
Los Altos, CA
(415) 949-9560
fax: (415) 949-0147
Psion, Inc.
Concord, MA
(508) 371-0310
fax: (508) 371-9611
RadioMail Corp.
San Mateo, CA
(800) 597-6245
(415) 286-7800
fax: (415) 286-7801
Sharp Electronics Corp.
Mahwah, NJ
(800) 237-4277
(201) 529-8200
Sony Electronics, Inc.
Park Ridge, NJ
(800) 556-2442
Apple Newton
Casio Z-7000
MessagePad 120
Personal Digital
Assistant
OS Newton Intelligence GEOS
CPU 20-MHz ARM 610 NEC V20-based
I/O Ports serial/LocalTalk, IR serial, IR, headphone jack
Standard RAM/ROM 1 MB/4 MB 1 MB/4 MB
Standard Communications none none
Optional Communications modem, radio modem, modem, cellular modem,
pager pager
Expansion one Type II PC Card one Type II PC Card
Input stylus stylus
Desktop Connectivity optional optional
Battery alkaline AA or nickel alkaline AA
cadmium
Weight 1 lb. 1 lb.
Dimensions (inches) 8 by 4 by 1.2 6.8 by 4.2 by 1
Base Price $599 $499.95
Fujitsu
Hewlett-Packard
PoqetPad Plus
HP 200LX
OS MS-DOS 5.0 MS-DOS 5.0
CPU 16-MHz NEC V30 7.91-MHz 80C186
I/O Ports serial (two), IR, serial, IR
keyboard
Standard RAM/ROM 2 MB/2 MB 1 MB/3 MB
Standard Communications none none
Optional Communications modem, radio modem modem, radio modem,
cellular modem
Expansion one Type II and one one Type II
PC Card
Type III PC Card
Input stylus, optional QWERTY keyboard
keyboard
Desktop Connectivity optional yes
Battery nickel-cadmium alkaline AA
Weight 1.77 lbs. 11 oz.
Dimensions (inches) 10 by 4.6 by 1.5 6.3 by 3.4 by 1
Base Price $1275 $549
Motorola Envoy
Motorola Marco
Wireless Communicator
Wireless Communicator
OS Magic Cap Newton Intelligence
CPU 16-MHz Motorola I 68349 20-MHz ARM 610
I/O Ports Magicbus, IR, modem serial/LocalTalk, IR
Standard RAM/ROM 1 MB/4 MB 1 MB/5 MB
Standard Co
mmunications modem, radio modem radio modem
Optional Communications pager (1) pager (1)
Expansion two Type II PC Card one Type II PC Card
Input stylus, optional stylus
keyboard
Desktop Connectivity yes optional
Battery nickel-cadmium nickel-cadmium
Weight 1.7 lbs. 1.8 lbs.
Dimensions (inches) 7.6 by 5.8 by 1.2 7.5 by 5.8 by 1.4
Base Price $1000 to $1500 $900 to $1400
Psion Series 3A
Sharp Zaurus
Palmtop
ZR-5000
OS Epoc (proprietary) Synergy (proprietary)
CPU 8-MHz NEC V30H-based 9.216-MHz Sharp ESR-P16
I/O Ports
serial, parallel serial, IR
Standard RAM/ROM 512 KB/1 MB 1 MB/4 MB
Standard Communications none none
Optional Communications modem, radio modem modem
Expansion proprietary slots one Type II PC Card
Input QWERTY keyboard stylus, QWERTY keyboard
Desktop Connectivity optional optional
Battery alkaline AA alkaline AA
Weight 9.7 oz. 13.6 oz.
Dimensions (inches) 6.5 by 3.3 by .9 6.7 by 3.9 by 1
Base Price $545 $749
Sony Magic Link
PIC-1000
OS Magic Cap
CPU 16-MHz Motorola I 68349
I/O Ports serial, IR, phone headset
Standard RAM/ROM
512 KB/4 MB
Standard Communications modem
Optional Communications pager
Expansion one Type II PC Card
Input stylus, optional keyboard
Desktop Connectivity optional
Battery alkaline AAA or lithium-ion
Weight 1.2 lbs.
Dimensions (inches) 7.5 by 5.2 by 1
Base Price $699.95
(1)=Paging also supported via built-in radio modem.
NOTE: Not every hand-held computing device is listed in this table,
of course; however, it does represent the broad variety of devices.
The proliferation of widely different hardware designs and OSes is
reminiscent of the early days of desktop computers.
photo_link (4 Kbytes)
photo_link (6 Kbytes)
photo_link (3 Kbytes)
photo_link (5 Kbytes)
photo_link (4 Kbytes)
photo_link (4 Kbytes)
photo_link (4 Kbytes)
photo_link (5 Kbytes)
photo_link (5 Kbytes)
miken@bix.com
.
PDAs Bounce Back
