Personal Technology: Palm Pilot Has New Rivals But No Competition
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By Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal
THE HOTTEST non-Microsoft computer-operating system on the market
today isn't one that comes readily to the lips of most industry leaders
and analysts. It's not some permutation of Sun's Java programming
language, which has so far created mostly press releases and lawsuits.
It's the Palm OS, the rising star that lies at the heart of the wildly
popular Palm Pilot series of hand-held computers built by little Palm
Computing, now a subsidiary of networking giant 3Com.
Palm's elegant, powerful platform has three qualities I believe point
the way to the future of computing. First, it's designed to do a limited
group of tasks very well, rather than to do 10,000 things unreliably.
Second, it's largely invisible to the user, with no desktop and few
menus. Finally, it's tightly tailored to custom-designed hardware.
To counter Palm and others, Microsoft has produced a stripped-down
version of Windows for limited-function computers, called Windows CE,
and has recently adapted it to little computers roughly the size of the
Pilot. In its typically overbearing fashion, Microsoft even tried to
swipe Palm's name, originally calling the gizmos Palm PCs.
I've been trying out one of these Pilot copycats, made by hardware
companies under strict design guidelines from Microsoft, against Palm's
own latest model, the Palm III. Even though the new Palm model has only
modest improvements, and I compared it with the best-designed of the new
CE machines, Philips' Nino, I found that Palm is still the king of this
category.
Microsoft and its hardware partners get credit for a decent first try
in the palm-sized category. But Palm wins this round, in my mind,
because it prizes simplicity over all else.
LIKE ITS HOT-SELLING forebears, the new $399 Palm III is small and
light enough to fit in a shirt or jacket pocket, or a small purse, yet
roomy enough to hold detailed information on thousands of contacts,
planned tasks and appointments, and plenty of e-mail and memos. It's
still rectangular and dark gray, but has been tapered and given a
protective lid. The memory has been beefed up from earlier models, and
the new model can "beam" information to a sibling through a new infrared
port.
Palm has kept the new model simple and trouble-free. Like the nearly
two million earlier units that Palm has already sold, the Palm III still
features the same clean, easy to learn user interface, with buttons that
launch each function. It still comes with an excellent companion
organizer program for desktop PCs, and it can still synchronize its data
with the PC by just popping the unit into a little cradle plugged into
the PC and pressing one button. What's more, the Palm III will run for
months on two cheap AA batteries.
At first glance, the $399 Philips Nino looks pretty similar. It's
roughly the same size and shape, and, like the Palm, it's controlled by
a small stylus that writes on the screen. It also synchronizes with a PC
via a cradle. But the Nino is thicker, longer and heavier, and its
batteries last for only 10 to 12 hours. It has some features the Palm
III lacks, but the price you pay is much more complexity. There are more
hardware buttons to figure out, more software menus, icons, commands and
programs to learn. In an effort to make the screen look something like
Windows, Microsoft has imported some of the density of Windows.
Among the Nino's strengths are a larger screen with better definition
than the Palm's, but the size advantage goes away when a box for
entering text pops up. (Palm places this text-entry box below the
screen.) And the Nino's screen is no brighter than the Palm's. Both are
too dim in many rooms without using the backlight, and both are so
reflective you could use them as shaving mirrors.
THE NINO also offers more ways than the Palm does to enter text. Both
have virtual on-screen keyboards and letter-by-letter handwriting
recognition that require practice to use well. But the Nino also uses a
clever grid that resembles a telephone keypad that tries to
intelligently guess what word you're tapping out before you complete it.
Palm plans to add the same system later this year. The Nino also can
record voice memos and respond to a limited number of voice commands,
though to me these are more gimmicks than core features.
Unfortunately, I found nearly every screen on the Nino more cluttered
and puzzling to use than the comparable screens on the Palm. Just
looking up information often took more steps on the Nino, partly because
the Palm has a dedicated "find" icon that's always visible. The Nino's
companion PC organizer software, Microsoft's old Schedule Plus, is no
match for Palm's desktop program.
Also, installation and synchronization were frustrating on the Nino. I
never could get CE synchronization working right on the first test
computer I used, and on the second machine I had to install Schedule
Plus twice to get it going. Maddeningly, the Windows CE synchronization
software kept trying to dial up my Internet service provider, even
though I wasn't synchronizing via a network.
Microsoft and its partners will surely improve the Windows CE devices.
But Palm's next model will include some truly breakthrough features that
will raise the bar significantly. If its parent firm, 3Com, gives Palm
the money and leeway it needs to keep innovating, it could become a
major force in all kinds of new digital appliances. |
