"Microsoft aims to pick Palm's lock on pocket"
Thursday, March 2, 2000, 08:00 a.m. Pacific
by Paul Andrews
Special to The Seattle Times
In Wallingford's Honey Bear Bakery, where laptops and lattes commingle in an atmosphere of laid-back productivity, Phil Holden is performing a little demonstration with a cell phone and hand-held PC.
Aligning the wireless infrared ports of each device, the Microsoft group product manager for mobile devices dials up his Internet account on the phone. Within moments, the home page of The Seattle Times appears on his Windows CE Jornada, complete with photo, menu and links.
"With this little baby, this is the year we'll have Microsoft's competitive answer to the Palm units," said Holden, whose British accent, shoulder-length black hair, three-day whiskers, silk shirt, jeans and dress boots give him the aura more of a hip-hop promoter than software executive.
On the other hand, Holden thinks his new gadget really rocks.
"This is like the step up from black-and-white TV to color," he said. "People are used to black-and-white, hard-to-read screens. We've got a unique proposition here."
It's called a PocketPC - Microsoft's latest, perhaps final, attempt to catch up in the hand-held device market. The first, a joint project with Compaq featuring Pen Computing for Windows, never made it to market. The second, featuring Windows CE on hand-held organizers, never fulfilled its promise despite a glitzy rollout, unflagging promotion and first-to-market color screens.
Only about one in 10 hand-held devices uses CE, according to International Data Corp., a market-analysis group in Framingham, Mass. Two vendors - Philips and Everex - stopped making the units altogether.
At the same time, Palm devices have greatly expanded, including the new Palm IIIc color organizer, foldable keyboards, wireless Internet connectivity, global-positioning-system modules and other features. Palm Computing, which makes the devices, also has licensed the technology to cell-phone vendors and consumer companies such as Sony and Handspring, a company offering similar capabilities in devices equipped to handle a variety of modules, from music to photography.
Capping off its success in the marketplace, where it enjoys an estimated 70 percent share in what it calls the "Palm Economy," Palm Inc. yesterday spun off from parent company 3Com with an initial public offering, raising $874 million.
Coincidentally, Microsoft today opened an intensive two-day workshop on the PocketPC for media and analysts at Seattle's Bell Harbor Center. The workshop features forthcoming devices from five vendors: Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Casio, Symbol and Siemens, the last of these popular in Europe. Although no official release date has been set, Holden said the devices will be available sometime before July.
Holden is unfazed by the market odds.
"Look at this," he says demonstrating a unit. "We're live on the Web, surfing just like on our desktop."
Connecting with the Internet via a hand-held device is nothing new. Web phones, the Palm VII and other devices offer connectivity. But display in most cases is limited to text or to browsing stored rather than live information.
The PocketPC advances the art largely through ClearType, a breakthrough that manipulates the pixels on the device's screen to provide a sharper, more readable image than traditional computer displays. With ClearType, Microsoft can display far more words or lines legibly on a hand-held screen.
ClearType, combined with a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser technology called fit-to-screen, also allows actual Web pages to be displayed on a 2.5-by-3.5-inch screen. An entire page will not fit, but enough material squeezes in to permit navigation around the page or through the Web site with a click or two of the stylus.
The PocketPC still suffers from the limitations of cell technology. Transfer speed is 19.2 kilobits a second, well below the standard home connection of 56K. Microsoft does some things to speed up display, including showing text before graphics, but the unit does not approach desktop computing speeds.
Speed, or bandwidth, should improve with advances in wireless technology. "The fatter pipes are coming," Holden said.
PocketPCs will offer other improvements over Windows CE devices, he said. They'll slim down to half the current width for a true pocket fit. They will offer USB support, enabling faster data transfer to and from desktop PCs. With a variety of hardware and memory modules, they will have stereo music, digital photography and other capabilities.
"People don't even know it's a camera - they think it's just another organizer," said Holden. "It's like a James Bond toy."
Holden said the new units will be priced comparably to Windows CE devices, in the $400 range.
Microsoft is banking that the PocketPC will draw a number of Palm switchovers. Studies indicated an enthusiastic response from Palm users, Holden said.
Paul Andrews is a technology correspondent for The Seattle Times.
Copyright ¸ 2000 The Seattle Times Company
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