LAS VEGAS - If there really are 2 million PalmPilots floating around out there, then at least half of them must be here at Comdex. In every other aisle, you're likely to find a guy in a bad suit standing in the middle of the surge of people, scratching away at his LCD Date Book. These sexy, simple little boxes have proven to be the first mega-hit PDA - and a hot topic at "Mobile Computers - Choices and Tradeoffs," a panel discussion held Monday.
The year's disappointment, Windows CE, was represented on the panel, too. Jim Floyd, Microsoft's handheld PC product manager, was putting a brave face on his 20 percent market share with CE Version 2.0 - the stripped-down operating system which now supports color screens and a few other goodies, like Pocket PowerPoint.
Sunday night, at the Bill Gates keynote, a US Marine demonstrated a ruggedized CE-based prototype device made for battlefield communications - by stomping on it. The rumor going around the room today had it that the Corps didn't like the PalmPilot because it needed a stylus. In a pinch, they said, they'd need to be able to use a bullet.
To be sure, the 10 companies making Windows CE devices and the one, 3Com, making the PalmPilot aren't really competitors. Depending on whom you ask, the former is a palmtop device, sub-sub-notebook, or handheld PC, while the latter is a personal digital assistant organizer.
But that's not to say Microsoft isn't getting organized about PDAs - one Redmond source recognized that the PalmPilot "does about 70 percent of the things you need to do, really well."
Enter Gryphon.
There aren't any Microsoft Gryphon prototypes on display in Las Vegas. In fact, the company isn't even acknowledging that they exist. The fellow at the Windows CE booth said he didn't know anything about it. And Floyd didn't have a clue, either. According to early reports, though, Gryphon will be a stripped-down version of CE aimed squarely at personal information management, the Pilot's forte.
So how might Microsoft embrace, extend, crush, and destroy the PalmPilot? One opportunity might lie at the challenge of form factors and the interface.
"The limiting factor isn't the technology, it's the human eye and the human hand," explained Amy Wohl, president of the consulting and market-research firm Wohl Associates.
It's also the human voice. Continuous speech recognition will be the next plateau for handhelds, to supplement, or even do away with, CE's keyboard and PalmPilot's stylus altogether, Wohl told the panel.
"The IBM guys have some really good voice-recognition technology, and when they can get it running on a processor in [the PalmPilot] without it being too hot to handle, I think that's going to be neat," said Rich Redelff, VP of marketing for 3Com mobile computing. "But that's a number of years away."
But there is a big difference between tomorrow's voice recognition and today's simple dictation for later processing on a desktop PC.
"One of the things you should be able to do is to dictate to a handheld unit, and then take that digital recording, probably on a PC card, put it into your computer, and have it recognized after the fact by a word processor or another [application]," Wohl said.
Philips has begun to lay the groundwork in this direction. Its Velo CE device has supported simple voice-memo recording for more than a year, and the company has been collecting customer feedback for future voice-activated commands.
"Where we'll be pointing is a fairly limited verb set that we'll be able to use to get into the most popular applications, like the [personal information management] applications, to pull up telephone numbers," said Philips representative Alan Soucy. "They will be some pretty simplistic things, but they start to point the way to where we are going."
There's no voice support hinted for PalmPilot, which intends to stay ahead of Gryphon with its aggressive third-party developer program, Redelff said.
Yet another challenge for the PDA market, some say, is the customization and personalization of these devices.
"Black is beautiful, but wouldn't it be great if there was more color and personality," said Kevin Clark, director of global strategic marketing for IBM mobile computing.
Indeed, at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers last month, a Swatch representative said that personalization of designs was one of the fundamental reasons for the watch-maker's remarkable success.
