The Second Coming of Personal Communicators : Motorola Product Presages Dawning of a New Generation of Digital Devices
Call them personal communicators or call them digital assistants. The little gadgets have a penchant for promising social revolution and ending up as expensive toys.
Remember Sharp’s pocket organizer, the Wizard? How about the Bookman, Sony’s portable CD player for reading books, and the Fujitsu Poquet, a pocketbook-size computer? Unless you’re a gadget-freak, you probably don’t.
Last year, EO’s personal communicator and Apple’s Newton Messagepad were added to the electronic clutter. Both products have sold in small numbers relative to the huge publicity that preceded them.
Still, don’t be too quick to dismiss these widgets. A new generation of products with built-in communications capabilities is on its way with the March 7 unveiling of a machine from Motorola based on a new operating system.
These new products will find homes with a small but growing band of mobile executives whose long hours on the road or time-sensitive business dealings make it important to receive and respond to faxes and electronic mail quickly no matter where they are or what they are doing.
As the infrastructure for wireless communications improves and as new software applications become available, you may yet wake up one day to discover that a single gadget can act as your date book, pager, note pad, calculator and cellular phone.
Link Resources, a New York-based research company, predicts sales of portable communications devices will begin to take off next year as better products are introduced, reaching 5 million annual units in 1998, up from the 779,000 devices sold last year.
Japanese consumer electronics companies, which have gone through a long barren period without any hit products, are excited by the market’s potential.
Mickey Shulhoff, president of Sony Corp. of America, said he wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2005, these devices are found in 40% of U.S. households. Sony has created a new division dedicated to design, manufacture and sell the personal communicators it plans to unveil in the fall, giving the product category the same weight, organizationally at least, as the company’s $4-billion consumer electronics division.
Meanwhile, personal digital assistants have flopped grandly enough to be the subject of derision in the Doonesbury comic strip.
“The first product is never the realization of the dreams of its inventors,” says Marc Porat, chief executive of General Magic, a start-up backed by, among others, Sony, Matsushita, Motorola and AT&T.; General Magic has developed software on which a new generation of products will be based. “It was true for radio and television, and it will continue to be true for personal communicators,” Porat said.
Clearly a lot has to happen before this market takes off. Take price. Motorola’s new device is expected to sell for slightly less than $1,000. It will include a built-in wireless modem.
“Nobody wants to spend $1,000 for a smart telephone or an organizer,” said Bruce Lupatkin, an analyst at Hambrecht & Quist, a San Francisco investment firm.
Then there is the communications software. A truly useful device would automatically make the necessary connections to tap corporate databases, collect e-mail or send voice messages, said Mark Eppley, president of Travelling Software, whose software is embedded in many of the devices.
Add to this the cost of subscribing to a wireless communications service so you can send and receive data. Today it costs $75 a month to subscribe to a service such as Ram Mobile Data.
Last and very far from least, there is the lack of software available for the machines to make them perform useful functions.
But these obstacles could fall quickly. McCaw Cellular predicts that by the end of the year, you will be able to subscribe to a wireless service that will enable you to pick up e-mail or get stock quotes sent to your personal communicator for as little as $20 a month. Forrester Research predicts that the devices themselves could fall to $200, one-fifth of this year’s price, by 1998.
Many of the new-generation devices that don’t come with built-in communications will have standardized slots into which credit-card-size wireless modems or pagers can be plugged in.
As for applications, the move toward software standards is making it increasingly attractive for software houses to develop programs for these devices.
In addition to the Newton software, which Apple recently agreed to license to other manufacturers, two other companies are aggressively pushing into this market and are expected to eclipse the Newton as industry standards.
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The more approachable system comes from General Magic. It offers a friendly interface and the ability to use “intelligent agents,” little packets of codes that, with simple instructions, will go searching through computer networks for information.
Porat says he has long wanted to see Madonna but could never remember to get tickets on time. Once the various services are in place, Magic Cap will enable the user to send an intelligent agent into the system with orders to buy tickets the next time Madonna comes to town--and to make sure the time doesn’t conflict with his schedule.
The first devices from Sony and Motorola will run on General Magic’s Magic Cap software.
The other major challenger in the field is Microsoft. Playing on its strength in personal computers, Microsoft is promoting the personal communicator market as a “companion” to the personal computer, aimed primarily at business executives who want wireless access to their computers whether they are out of town on business or wandering the hallways outside their offices.
The move toward a few key software standards has encouraged software houses to write for the devices. In spite of the bad publicity that has accompanied poor sales of the Newton and the EO, software houses are rushing into the market.
Apple says it has already sold more than 2,800 kits to help developers create software for the Newton. Albert Chu, director of product planning and strategy at Apple’s personal interactive electronics division, says there are now 27 packages available on the system, and there will be 100 applications available by the end of summer.
Among the more interesting applications: a package that turns the Newton into a mini-teleprompter, allowing the user to scroll through a speech at a comfortable speed.
Software available for Magic Cap devices include an interpreter for travelers, Intuit’s popular Quicken personal finance program, an Official Airline Guides package for checking fares and seat availability and a spreadsheet.
“We have been through several generations of these machines,” said Faruq Ahmad, vice president at PenWare Inc., the spreadsheet company. He has used the Motorola device soon to be unveiled and is suitably impressed. Now that the machines have built-in communications capabilities enabling users to pull information out of their office computers, “this market will start to take off,” Ahmad said.
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Microsoft is a latecomer to the market; products using its software are not due out until year-end. But it has already held conferences and created tools to help companies build portable extensions to their Windows software packages.
“The important thing is to get access to the information running on your desktop,” said Bruce Baker, Microsoft’s general manager of hand-held systems. He envisions people using the portable devices to browse through and pick out files or read mail while they are on the road or walking around their offices.
While General Magic’s “intuitive” approach may make it a stronger contender in the long run for the non-technical user, Baker argues that it will be a long time before the market extends beyond business.
Both companies agree that the key function that will drive these new-generation devices is e-mail. Not long ago, e-mail use was restricted to technical people, or those working in large corporations with in-house systems. Now hundreds of thousands of new users each month are tapping into on-line systems to send electronic messages.
“With these devices, it will be like sending electronic Post-its,” Porat said.
A major technical problem has always been how to get data into the devices without a keyboard. The Newton and EO were supposed to solve the problem using a technology called handwriting recognition. The user scribbles letters directly onto a screen for the computer to translate into letters or numbers that can then be manipulated by computer. The technology has proved cumbersome and slow.
General Magic tries to avoid the problem by offering visual cues and a touch screen. When data entry is absolutely necessary, you touch letters on a projection of a keyboard on the small screen.
AT&T;’s EO is minimizing that problem by targeting its next product as a simple-to-use “smart cellular phone” with such additional features as e-mail and faxing, rather than a computing device with varied uses.
Apple’s Chu said the primary market for these devices over the next year will be in applications custom-developed for specific companies. He said there are already 100 major corporations developing software to use the Newton in-house.
As more software, including games, becomes available for the devices, Chu said, the market will broaden. Meanwhile, the products could continue to face tough times.
In response to General Magic and Microsoft’s criticism of the Newton’s performance, Chu said: “They haven’t even shipped product yet. When they get to the market, they will find a different reality.”
