Predicting the Future Handheld

LAS VEGAS -- The future of wireless handheld devices does not appear to be headed toward one unit that can mimic all the functions of the PC.

That was the conclusion reached during a panel on "Digital Innovations" held here at Comdex Tuesday. The forum speakers included major players from Nokia, Research in Motion, Palm, OmniSky, and Sony.

The Handheld Convergence Question

Moderator Walter Mossberg, personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, told the large audience that he feels that these early years of the twenty-first century are as exciting a time for wireless handhelds as the 1970s were for the personal computer.

One major question stands, Mossberg says. Is the device going to be a cell phone that merges some of the features of the PDA or a PDA that merges some features of a cell phone?

According to Tim Eckersley, a senior vice president at Nokia, no single device is going to dominate the market. Instead, he predicts, there would be three types: some voice-centric, some data-centric, and some hybrids driven by PDA interfaces. (See "Play MP3s on Your Cell Phone.")

Some of these hybrids are already in the works, of course. Handspring, whose Visor commands about a quarter of the PDA market, has begun shipping a mobile phone PDA add-on, the $299 VisorPhone. Meanwhile, Palm is codeveloping a phone built around the Palm OS with Motorola and has renewed its license to Kyocera, which distributes the Qualcomm PDQ phone built on the Palm OS. (See "PDAs and Phones Merger at Wireless Show.") Microsoft is also working on a phone, code named Stinger, that incorporates its Pocket PC PDA into a mobile handset.

Palm says it is also working with Nokia, the world's largest cell phone maker, to use the Palm interface and applications with the Symbian platform.

Trimming Is Tough

Mike Lazaridis, president and cochief executive of RIM, makers of the popular BlackBerry handhelds, says one of the biggest challenges in making the "new handheld" is to decide what to take off the product. Palm's concept was correct: to do a few things really well, he says.

"We need to take advantage of the latent powers of the Internet (in what it can deliver), Lazaridis says, "but not try to duplicate the screen of the PC and what you see there at home on a phone."

After bemoaning the lag the United States has had in wireless communications due to lack of a single unifying standard, panel members say there are signs of progress.

Two months ago, Nokia launched Short Message Services in the United States, Eckersley says. SMS provides two-way messaging from phones.

In those 60 days, "tens of millions" of SMS messages have been sent, an indicator of the coming explosion in data services, Eckersley adds.

In mobile devices, ergonomics may prove to be more an issue than technology, suggests Patrick McVeigh, chair and CEO of OmniSky. In other words, is the device comfortable and manageable to hold and use?

And although technologies such as Bluetooth will certainly factor into the design of the next generation information appliances, it will still be applications that matter, says William Maggs, Palm chief technology officer.