Text of Walter Mossberg / Kyocera QCP 6035 review (from today's WSJ).
March 8, 2001
Wireless Phone and Palm
Are United in Smartphone
BY WALTER S. MOSSBERG
DID YOU EVER FIND yourself trying to juggle a mobile phone and a Palm
hand-held computer to look up phone numbers or consult your calendar while
making a series of calls? It has happened to me, and at those awkward
moments, I always wonder when there will be a single device that can
smoothly combine a phone and a really good personal digital assistant, or PDA.
Well, one such device hit the market this week.
It's called the Kyocera Smartphone, and it's
nothing less than a wireless phone with a genuine
Palm PDA built right in. At first glance, it looks
like a normal mobile phone. But you can flip down
the hinged keypad to reveal a fully functional
Palm, with all the familiar capabilities, icons and
buttons.
The Kyocera QCP 6035, as it's formally known,
was introduced Monday by Verizon Wireless at $499. It's the latest entry in a
high-stakes battle to merge the phone and the PDA.
Some companies are trying to take the familiar rectangular PDA design and add
phone capabilities to appeal to data-centric people who make a few calls.
Others are trying to take the equally familiar design of the wireless phone and
add PDA features, including a larger screen, to appeal to heavy phone users
who want access to data. All of these combo devices, including the new
Kyocera, also have wireless e-mail and Web functions.
ON THE PDA SIDE of the war, the only candidate so far has been
Handspring's elegant VisorPhone, a small $299 attachment for the
Palm-compatible Handspring Visor that adds phone, e-mail and Web
capabilities.
On the phone side, success has been elusive. The
Sprint TP3000 and the R380 from Ericsson have their
virtues, but they lack the brilliant user interface and
the broad compatibility of the genuine Palm design.
The only previous effort to embed a real Palm PDA
into a wireless phone, the Qualcomm pdQ, was a
miserable failure, far too large and far too costly.
This new Smartphone from Kyocera, which took
over Qualcomm's mobile-phone business, is much
better. It's considerably lighter, shorter and thinner
than the Qualcomm pdQ. People who insist on a very
small phone won't like it, but I found it fit nicely in
my hand, briefcase or jacket pocket, and was more
convenient than juggling two devices. It's less than an
inch thick, 2.6 inches wide and 5.6 inches long, and
weighs 7.3 ounces.
You can use the Smartphone just like a regular telephone. It has all the best
features of modern phones, including speed dialing, voice dialing via speech
recognition and even a speaker phone. There's also a jack for the included
headset. Phone functions are accessed from a standard-type menu that you
navigate with a dial on the side. The battery gives you about 4.5 hours of talk
time and up to 110 hours of standby time.
But the Palm inside is what makes the Smartphone special. Even if the phone is
off, when you flip down the keypad, the Palm turns on. It has the familiar
calendar, address book, memo pad and to-do list, all accessible from the usual
four buttons at the bottom.
THE PHONE'S CHARGING cradle hooks up to your PC and synchronizes
with either Palm's own software, Microsoft Outlook, or a variety of other
programs. You can also download and run any of the thousands of extra Palm
programs. And you can exchange data with other Palms by beaming. The unit
has a generous eight megabytes of memory.
If you want to dial a number in your Palm address book, you just tap on the
number and a dialing screen appears. Tap once more on a phone icon, and the
call is placed. You can also access your Palm address-book numbers from the
phone's screen, with the lid closed, by selecting the address book from the
phone menu. Palm address-book entries can also be set up for speed dial or
voice dial. While you're on a call, all the Palm functions are active, so you can
look up other numbers or use your calendar. That's especially convenient if
you're on the headset or speaker phone.
Because of the Palm, this phone's Internet functionality is vastly better than the
typical telephone's. Instead of a numbing series of Web menus, the Kyocera
comes with a Web browser and a decent e-mail program that can access your
existing Internet e-mail account, both from Eudora. It also sports a variety of
Palm Web applications, like an E*Trade stock program and an American
Airlines program to look up flights. You can download more of them.
Accessing the Web is a simple matter of just launching any of these programs.
Most Web connections are made quickly.
So what are the downsides of the Kyocera
Smartphone? Well, my biggest problem involves
the screen. It's narrower than the screen on a
Palm V, yet it displays the same number of lines
and the same number of letters in a line. That
means the standard font is smaller than on a
regular Palm and can be hard to read, especially
since the screen seems a bit dimmer than the Palm V's. To fix the problem,
you can enlarge the font, but then you get fewer words on each line.
Also, the Eudora browser, at present, doesn't support secure online
transactions.
All in all, however, the Kyocera Smartphone is the first really good
PDA-equipped phone I've seen. If you long to merge your phone and your
Palm, it may be just what you're looking for.
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
