This week's Palm Computing Worldwide Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California, brought a series of announcements positioning the PalmPilot at the crossroads of pocketable convenience and global reach.
The next-generation Palm VII will allow consumers to jack into the Net wirelessly, extracting critical info-bites from major Web sites.
Meanwhile, the original PalmPilot inventors -- Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky -- are up to their own tricks, having left 3Com this fall to start Handspring.
Wired News spoke with Dubinsky about what lies ahead.
Wired News: What is the future of handheld computing?
Donna Dubinsky: The market is going to be huge, extensive, broad. Ultimately, in terms of the unit volume, I see it more similar to the cell phone business than the PC business. I look out five years, and everybody's going to be carrying something like this. When you saw the first Sony Walkman, it was one thing. Now, years later, you see racks and racks of underwater walkmans and My First Walkmans. I see a similar opportunity here and similar scale: ubiquitous devices. There's a lot of room for us to create a major new company.
WN: What was it that you weren't able to do at Palm that inspired you and Jeff to start Handspring?
Dubinsky: We never set out to be a division of a multinational, multibillion dollar networking company. That was an accident of history. Our ambition and true love was to create a big new business that had fundamental impact in the world. We wanted to do that independently. So one [reason we left 3Com] was a desire for independence.
I enjoy this business enormously, but I wasn't interested in the networking business. The person who's running a big division of a bigger company has to be involved in defining and driving the overall business.
Palm is becoming very important to 3Com, and the role that leader has to play is really a bridge role between that business and the whole. That's a fine role for a lot of people, but it's not what I wanted to do.
As far as the products we'll be announcing, however, that's still at least a year out. Why talk about it now? It's just vaporware. WN: When did you first start thinking about the device that became the PalmPilot?
Dubinsky: Spring of 1994. We'd started out as an applications software company. We said, "OK -- this is going to be just like the desktop business. There'll be the OS [operating system] guys, the hardware guys, the apps guys. We're going to be the leading apps guys."
We took our seat at the table. We worked with Casio, Sharp, Tandy, and Hewlett-Packard. We worked with everybody who was working in the field at that time -- Apple, General Magic. But none of the platforms were compelling. We saw a very dismal future in being the leading apps provider for a non-existent market.
WN: A lot of people carry two devices: a Pilot and a cell phone. It seems as if there's a new unified product that everyone's groping toward. What might that be like?
Dubinsky: A lot of people struggle with voice/data combinations. There have been a lot of tries in the smart-phone space, starting with the IBM Simon, the Nokia 9000 -- all of which have basically failed.
There are such wonderful small phones today, when you stack up these hunkers next to them, they're unappealing. Nobody has yet presented the right combination of form, utility, and user interface. If you have a combined device and someone says, "Let's have lunch next Tuesday," your eyes and your ears are in different places.
Palm is doing a product with Qualcomm, called pdQ, that's smaller than the bulkier phones and PalmPilot-compatible. We'll all be tracking carefully how well that product does, and what people like and don't like about it. There's a lot of learning yet to do before we have a great combo device out there that's compelling.
WN: Do you see the Internet as having a role in that device?
Dubinsky: Mobile devices will be the future of accessing the Internet. There will be very exciting products in this platform that allow you very fast, easy, and useful access to information on the Internet.
WN: Do you keep up with the development of applications that you might not have planned on, like people using the PalmPilot to read novels?
Dubinsky: The amazing variety of what people do with [the PalmPilot] has been as big a surprise to us as the incredibly fast rate of adoption. You can get the Singapore subway map, the 49ers schedule, an astronomy app, or Moby Dick. There are 10,000 developers working on it. That's unbelievable.
WN: What three apps do you have on your PalmPilot that are the most unusual?
Dubinsky: My favorite game is Gem Hunt. I get an enormous kick out of the biorhythms app. And I really like a little utility called Password Store, because I'm overwhelmed with different passwords for every Web page I'm on. I have a wonderful new hardware accessory, a very small lightweight keyboard called GoType, that's very nicely done. The things I like are pretty pedestrian.
