The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- July 2,
1998
The Palm Pilot Has Rivals
But No True Competition
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
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.
Walter S. Mossberg answers selected computer and
technology questions from readers in Mossberg's Mailbox. If
you have a question you want answered, or any other
comment or suggestion about his column, please e-mail
Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.
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.
For answers to your computer questions, check out my
Mossberg's Mailbox column in the Tech Center.
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