Not too sure if this is posted or not: "Putting Palm and Phone in One Hand, or Pocket"
dailynews.yahoo.com
Thursday March 15 09:00 AM EST
"Putting Palm and Phone in One Hand, or Pocket"
By DAVID POGUE The New York Times
The $500 Kyocera Smartphone QCP 6035 is a superbly designed,
inventive and versatile gadget that combines a cellular telephone
and a Palm computer.
IT would have been a fascinating bonus
question on the 2000 census questionnaire:
"What battery- powered equipment do you
have in your pockets right now?"
The most popular answer, given by 80
million respondents, would certainly have
been, "A cell phone." About 11 million
would have replied, "A Palm organizer." But
a third group would have answered with an
outburst: "A Palm and a phone. And you
can also write on your little form that I'm
sick and tired of carrying around both — I
clank like Robocop when I walk. If they can put a man on the moon,
why can't they combine a Palm and a phone?"
They have certainly tried. In 1999, Qualcomm introduced a massive,
memory- starved, $800 cell phone-plus-Palm III called the pdQ, which
slipped into your pocket with all the grace of a V-6 engine. Last year,
the Palm clone maker, Handspring, unveiled the VisorPhone, a module
that plugs into the company's Visor organizers. Unfortunately, the
VisorPhone relies on the GSM cell network, whose coverage in the
United States is still limited. And you can't push the phone's on-screen
dialing buttons without looking at them, as on a regular cell phone.
The third time's the charm. When Kyocera bought Qualcomm's cell-
phone division last year, its engineers saw the failed Qualcomm pdQ
phone as a gem in the rough. If only it were 40 percent less expensive,
40 percent thinner and 25 percent lighter. If only it had four times the
memory, ran twice as long on a battery charge and worked on three
common cell networks (Analog, CDMA PCS and CDMA digital
cellular) instead of one.
The result is the $500 Kyocera Smartphone QCP 6035, which is
available for the moment only with a one-year Verizon service contract.
This isn't one of those trendy microscopic phones by any means. At 5.6
inches long and seven ounces, the Smartphone is in no danger of
tumbling into your ear canal when you're jostled on the sidewalk. But
you won't resent its size for long — the Smartphone is a superbly
designed, inventive and versatile gadget that demonstrates, once again,
the Microsoftian motto: "If at first your product flops, refine, refine
again."
As a phone, the Smartphone is at the top of its class. It bristles with
safety features for drivers, like 99 speed-dial codes and a
speech-recognition feature that calls any of 30 selected friends and
colleagues when you utter their names. The included headset and built-in
speakerphone aren't just for hands- free driving safety. They also let you
consult your Palm calendar or take notes without having to interrupt
your conversation.
When you flip open the keypad, you discover that it has been hiding a
full-blown Palm computer running the latest Palm operating system
(3.5). It also has a 2-by-2- inch touch screen filled with sharp-looking
gray-scale graphics. Next to the tiny, terse screens on most phones, this
one looks like the Times Square Jumbotron.
One battery drives the phone (for four and a half hours of talking or four
days on standby) and the Palm. When the battery is too feeble to power
the phone, the Palm still works for about two weeks. When there's not
even enough juice for the Palm, you have two more weeks to insert a
charged battery before your data disappears.
But even if you lose your data (or your phone), you won't worry about
losing all those notes and phone numbers — you'll always have a
backup. Like every Palm, this one comes with a synchronization cradle,
which in this case doubles as a charger for the phone and its extra
battery.
When you put the phone into the cradle and press a button, your
address book, calendar, to-do list and e-mail are automatically siphoned
out of your Mac or PC and into the phone's eight megabytes of
memory. (To use the phone with current Mac models, you need to
download software from Palm.com and buy a $40 U.S.B. adapter.)
Then the real fun begins. Kyocera has designed the phone and the Palm
software to intertwine in dozens of ingenious ways. The best one is the
symbiosis between the phone and your Palm address book: a single
stylus tap on any phone number from your social circle dials that person.
You can't help but smile when you are spared the usual new- cell-phone
ritual of entering those names and numbers into the phone.
When a call comes in, the phone rings or vibrates, as you choose. The
screen shows the caller's phone number (and name, if it's in your
address book). You can even specify different ringer sounds for callers
in each of the address book's 15 categories so calls from the office, for
example, get a commanding Star Trek chirp, but calls from your ex
merit only a vibration.
When a first-time caller reaches you, a couple of thumb nudges on the
phone's left- side roller switch create a new address-book entry. (You
still have to record the caller's name by using the Palm's Graffiti
handwriting-recognition alphabet or tapping the on-screen keyboard.)
What really vaults the Smartphone into gadget-freak heaven, though, is
the choice of 15,000 Palm programs that you can install into it, thereby
turning the device into a music synthesizer, a photo album, a restaurant-
tip calculator, an electronic-book reader, a TV remote control or a
game arcade. (You haven't lived until you and a buddy have played
Battleship across the boardroom table using the built-in infrared
transmitter while everyone thinks you're taking notes.)
Verizon installs some of these programs before you get the phone. It
loads Eudora for Palm, for example, so you can send and receive e-mail
(without attachments) using your ordinary Internet account. You also get
the Eudora Web browser, which speeds up the arrival of Web pages by omitting graphics. If you
prefer to see the pictures, you can always substitute another free Palm Web browser. And if you prefer
a big- screen, color Web experience, you can use the phone as a wireless modem for a laptop.
But if you're into the Web, here's another pleasant shock: the Smartphone also runs something called
Web clippings, which Palm originally invented for its wireless Palm VII organizer. These tiny programs
make high-speed data grabs from specific Web sites. Today, you can choose from 600 Web clippings,
and all of them can be downloaded free from www.palm.net.
The Smartphone runs these Web clippings much faster than the Palm VII itself. When I tested it, it
took four seconds to check a stock price, three seconds to download a 210- word encyclopedia
article and seven seconds to find some airline flights to L.A. (Verizon doesn't charge extra for using the
Smartphone or its Internet features.)
Yet even if the Smartphone is the smartest phone yet, it's not beyond criticism. As noted earlier, it's not
what you'd call waiflike. The image on the screen is slightly shrunken compared with images on
standard Palms. And the quality of the built-in speaker, used by the speakerphone and a voice-memo
feature, won't put Bose out of business any time soon.
Otherwise, though, the Kyocera Smartphone is a home run. The more time you spend with it, the more
you realize how it can change your work routine, your packing list and your mood when you're stuck in
traffic. Rival organizer-phones are already available or scheduled for release later this year, but they
lack the polished Palm operating system. For now, it would be hard to imagine a happier and more
natural marriage than this one between two of the world's most popular pocket gizmos. |
