WSJ review of I* phone and PalmPilot
March 11, 1999
Cure for PC Boredom:
A Truly Global Phone
PERSONAL COMPUTERS have gotten pretty boring lately. There's
a real dearth of interesting new features. So it's fortunate for us technology
writers, and anybody interested in using or investing in technology, that we
seem to have entered a new age of cool, high-tech gadgets. That's where
the action is.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been
trying out two of these new devices: one a
bulky gizmo that can keep you in touch
with home from the most remote areas of
the globe; the other a sleek, slim new
version of the popular Palm Pilot hand-held digital assistant.
First, the globe-girdling gadget. Motorola's new Satellite Series 9500
wireless telephone is the first phone that makes calls from anywhere using
the new 66-satellite, privately owned Iridium satellite grid. A normal
wireless phone relies on a network of landlocked transmitters and
receivers which create invisible "cells" of connectivity. If you travel beyond
the cells, or find yourself in a gap in the cell network, the phone service
fades or dies.
But the low-orbit Iridium satellites are positioned to create enough gigantic
cells to cover every inch of the planet, including plains, deserts and oceans.
When you place an Iridium call, the signal zooms 500 miles into space to
the nearest satellite, then is bounced to a satellite nearest the recipient.
That satellite beams it back down, either contacting the recipient's phone
directly, if it's another Iridium unit in a remote area, or, more typically,
sending the signal to a ground station that then routes it through a
traditional phone system.
IT SOUNDS GREAT, but there are some catches. First, it costs a lot.
The Motorola 9500 phone, sold by service providers such as Sprint PCS
in the U.S., costs around $3,000 and calls are priced at roughly $1.75 to
$7 a minute. A separate Motorola satellite pager is about $500 for the unit
and about $140 a month for the service. So the likeliest users are remote
field workers, sailors, foreign correspondents and ranchers who spend
their days in the open range, far from cell-phone networks.
Secondly, while the phone is much smaller than previous satellite phones,
it's still a bulky thing, about the size and weight of the cell phones of a
decade ago. And its antenna is a thick, black cylinder that looks like a gun
barrel or silencer, and must be plainly visible for the phone to work.
Iridium ads show the phone, but omit the ugly antenna.
Finally, calls won't go through unless the phone has a clear view of the sky,
unobstructed by tall buildings or even dense foliage. When Motorola first
showed me the phone, we had to climb to the roof of an office building to
use it. It works poorly inside buildings, even near windows. Also, while
Motorola plans a future kit that will allow the phone to work with a PC, it
will transmit data very slowly, at just 2,400 bits a second.
I tested the phone in a rural area where both analog and digital cellular
phones often die. Driving through woods and farms, the Motorola 9500
did fine on several very expensive calls to my office and family. Voice
quality was fair. However, the calls died once the road entered an area of
dense overhead tree growth.
NO SUCH breakthrough technology is offered with the new Palm V
digital assistant. This latest incarnation of 3Com's wildly successful Palm
Pilot series of hand-held PCs just has lots of style at a premium price. The
Palm V has all the same features and power as the current Palm III model,
but a classier look outside.
Like the Palm III, the new Palm V can hold years of appointments and
thousands of contacts, all synchronized with a PC. But it's only about half
as thick as the Palm III, making it lighter and easier to carry in a shirt
pocket, and its surface is made of a good-looking shiny anodized
aluminum, with recessed buttons.
Best of all, the Palm V screen is
much sharper and easier to read in
dim light than the screen on the Palm
III. In fact, the screen quality is a
strong attraction of the new model,
even for those who don't care about
having things that are thin and shiny.
But there's a price to be paid for all
of this. The Palm V costs $450, a
50% premium over the newly
reduced $300 Palm III. Its new
shape also means veteran Palm owners will need to buy all new
accessories, including a modem if they use one.
The Palm V is also too thin to house the cheap disposable batteries of its
predecessors. Instead, it uses a rechargeable battery that lasts only about
21 hours between charges, about half the battery life of the Palm III. Still,
the new battery shouldn't be a problem, because it's constantly recharged
in a few minutes by the new-style cradle the Palm V uses for
synchronization with PCs.
In my tests, the Palm V worked fine, except it couldn't download e-mail
from the new Version 5 of Microsoft's popular Outlook Express mail
program, which ships next week. Microsoft says it's a problem in the new
e-mail program and is working on a fix.
For serious Palm addicts, there is another new model, the $370 Palm IIIx,
which is just a Palm III with double the memory. It also has an improved
screen, but it's not as good as the one on the Palm V, which has me
hooked. As middle age advances upon me, anything that's sharper and
thinner seems like a good deal.
How can you give to charity every time you buy something on the
Web? To find out, check my Mossberg's Mailbox column in
today's Tech Center.
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