wing popularity is evident in a recent Dataquest study, which reveals that in 1996 the market for standard hand-held computers grew 80 percent.
As our review of the most recent crop of hand-held PCs reveals, these units won't replace your laptop today. But they are starting to become truly practical, standardized, and able to do just about anything a notebook or desktop can do (aside from running Doom or Diablo, of course).
The Players
We judged
10 hand-held
computers for their usability, features, and performance. Six run Windows CE, Microsoft's scaled-down version of 32-bit Windows designed specifically for hand-helds: Casio's Cassiopeia A-11 Plus, NEC's MobilePro 450, Hewlett-Packard's 320LX Palmtop PC, Hit
achi's HPW-10E4MB, Compaq's PC Companion C140, and Philips' Velo 1. These devices run on two AA batteries, have an LCD touchscreen, an IrDA (Infrared Device Association) port, and a minimum of 4 MB of RAM and 4 MB of ROM.
We also tested systems based on proprietary OSes, such as Sharp's Zaurus ZR-5800FX, Psion's Series 3C, U.S. Robotics' Palm Pilot Professional, and Apple's Newton MessagePad 2000. We passed on Nokia's Communicator 9000 because, at press time, it required a GSM European cellular network. Additionally, Psion's Series 5 was in early beta when we tested, and Sharp's SE 500 was in alpha stage as we went to print. The Toshiba Libretto 50CT, which is similar in size and features to many of the hand-helds we tested, runs full versions of Windows 95 as well as full applications and costs just under $2000. It missed our price cap, so we did not include it in our tests.
Weighing the Features
Two camps of hand-held users are emerging. Some prefer the small, light, cheap, appliance-l
ike computers, such as the USR Pilot Professional or the Sharp 5000. Others, like Psion and Velo1 users, want as many bells and whistles as conceivable packed into the smallest device possible.
All Windows CE hand-helds have the advantage of an interface that is familiar, is easy to use, and offers the closest thing to the Windows 95 desktop. Because Windows CE is an open standard, various processors and software applications can be ported to the OS. On the downside, software development for the platform is in its early stages, and the multithreaded, multitasking OS is resource-intensive. This may explain why our tests showed that Windows CE hand-helds were 28 percent slower in overall file transfer speed than the proprietary systems.
That's not to say that non-CE devices are perfect. Inherent to the proprietary systems is a learning curve required to master both the OS and some applications, including handwriting recognition software. Architecture can differ dramatically among systems, so there's
no guarantee of interoperability or backward compatibility between different proprietary hand-helds. But each has a strong community of users plus active software development that, for the time being, surpasses that of Windows CE.
The Next Generation
I have small fingers. So it wasn't all too difficult to successfully touch-type on many of the hand-held computers we tested. Enhancements in keyboard design, such as Butterfly-like or external keyboards, are making it easier than ever to type notes. In fact, I drafted a rough cut of this review on a hand-held computer. Such productivity would not have been possible with an early-generation PDA, such as the Sharp Wizard OZ 5100 that I carried around a few years ago. Interestingly, many of the systems in this review are the same size, or only slightly larger than, my old Wizard--yet they are all much more functional and loads more powerful.
Number one on my wish list for future generations of hand-held computers is voice control, which would
be of greater value than pen input and handwriting recognition. Future hand-helds are also expected to make use of built-in pagers. This is likely not too far off since Hitachi's SH-3 RISC processor, which powers the Hewlett-Packard, Casio, Compaq, and Hitachi models we tested, includes support for (among other things) voice-activated control and two-way paging.
Contributors
Michelle Campanale
, technical editor/BYTE
Andrew Froning
, managing editor/NSTL
Dorothy Hudson
, project manager/NSTL
Maryanne Eves
, acquisitions editor/NSTL
Linda Higgins
, editorial associate/BYTE
Bryan Farmer
, editorial assistant/BYTE
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Hand-Helds Get Serious
