November 9, 2000 wsj
----Sprint Attempts to Add
Organizer to Cell Phone
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
HOW DO YOU create the ideal digital handheld device -- one that might replace both a wireless phone and a personal digital assistant, such as a Palm device?
Last week, we took a look at an effort to add phone and Internet functionality to a Palm-like Handspring Visor through an ingenious attachment called a VisorPhone. It works pretty well, but there are also efforts to go at it from the opposite direction: to add organizer functions and Internet capability with a decent-size screen to a wireless phone.
I've been testing such a souped-up phone -- the TP3000 from Sprint. This $400 model, built for Sprint by a unit of LG, the Korean electronics maker, will go on sale later this month. At first glance, it looks like a normal cell phone, with a small window at the top for viewing normal phone information and a keypad below for dialing.
But both the window and the keypad are mounted on a lid that swings up to reveal a much larger touch screen filled with Palm-like icons you can select using a small stylus tucked into a slot on the rear of the phone.
By tapping on one of the icons, you can enter a date book, contact manager, to-do list, memo pad, Web browser or other applications. The TP3000 synchronizes with a PC, just like a Palm or Visor, so you can import your address book and calendar from Microsoft Outlook.
IN MY TESTS, the TP3000 was much better than the first attempt to embed a real organizer into a phone, Qualcomm's ill-fated pdQ -- a bulky, clumsy $800 brick that I hated. The TP3000 is much smaller than that, though it's still large compared with the smallest cell phones.
Sprint TP3000 (opened)
But I found the TP3000 to be far more tedious to use than the Visor with the VisorPhone attached. The proprietary organizer software is decidedly inferior to real Palm software, which the Visor uses. For one thing, it lacks Palm's handwriting recognition. And Web browsing and e-mail are only a little less frustrating than on phones with smaller screens.
There are some good points to the TP3000. The synchronization process worked very well, and it's a huge bonus having your entire contact list on the phone, with every entry able to be dialed quickly via a few screen taps. The touch screen, with the stylus, uses a virtual onscreen keyboard to enter data. This is a slow and clumsy method, but it's superior to tapping out letters on a phone keypad.
The phone is solid to the feel and has easy-to-use navigation buttons. It even worked well for me as a speaker phone and as a slow, but reliable, wireless modem, for my PC. But it falls down on the job as an organizer and an Internet device, mainly due to the screen and the user interface.
Compared with a Visor with the VisorPhone attached, the TP3000 is a bit shorter, a tad thinner and even a little lighter. It's also significantly narrower, but that's a mixed blessing. It fits more comfortably in the hand -- more like a phone than a PDA. But that narrow width significantly constricts the screen size, even when the lid is lifted to reveal the whole thing.
The result is that even though the screens on the two devices are the same length, the TP3000 screen is only about two-thirds as wide as the Visor's.
COUPLED WITH THE use of a larger typeface than the Visor's standard font, that means much less information can be contained on the screen.
For instance, if you enter an appointment titled "Discussion of Florida Voting Madness" on both machines, the whole title shows on the Visor in small but crisp and readable letters. On the TP3000 phone, however, all you see is two words: "Discussion of." That's hardly helpful. You have to tap on the listing to read more, and then you get a screen with such a mass of detail it's hard to pick out the relevant information at a glance.
What's more, the screen is extraordinarily insensitive, right out of the box. On two test units, I found I had to grind the flimsy stylus into the screen to get any response, and this made for many errors. It was even nearly impossible to use the feature that recalibrates screen sensitivity.
Eventually, I was able to make the screen more sensitive to the touch, and things went much better. But this is a serious problem that will be hard for average users to correct.
If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about Walter S. Mossberg's column, please send e-mail to mossberg@wsj.com
The Web function on the TP3000 comes complete with services from AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and others. But wading through the many menus and lists to make these work was a real chore. Most of the e-mail programs available weren't in any way connected to the phone's address book, which was just plain stupid. On the Visor, most of the e-mail applications are smart enough to let you look up e-mail addresses in your address book.
Don't despair, however, about phones with big screens and built-in organizers. Another one is on the horizon. It's the Kyocera Smartphone and, unlike the TP3000, it has a real Palm organizer built into a body that's about the same size as the Sprint model. Kyocera, which inherited Qualcomm's cell-phone business, says it has learned from Qualcomm's mistakes with the hefty pdQ phone and will announce its new Smartphone later this month, for sale early in 2001.
For answers to questions about creating CDs, blocking pop-up ads, and understanding the nomenclature of digital video recording, check out my Mossberg's Mailbox column in Tech Center. |
