Pages on a PalmPilot
I realise that this won't directly affect most British users, but 3com have recently announced a new deal that, I believe, will have such far reaching implications it will, in time, come to change the way each of us thinks of a PDA. 3com, Motorola and PageMart Wireless (a pager service provider, http://www.pagemart.com ) have announced a pager card for PalmPilots. This replaces the back cover of the PalmPilot, and installs as a 2 Mb memory upgrade card. The unit ends up with a slight bulge on the back, and then becomes a pager receiver. As well as receiving text messages, it will look up numeric messages in the Addresses application to see who might be sending it, but also includes the ability to receive calendar updates (using the vCalendar format), and potentially other data or program updates over a wireless network.
The pager network in the USA is far more developed than in the UK, with most people who would, in the UK, have a mobile phone carrying a pager instead of, or as well as, a mobile. This is possible because until recently mobile phone coverage has been poor in the United States, and local calls to return pages are very cheap from pay phones (25c), and many businesses will let you make local calls from their premises for no charge. As a result, a pager has better range, and is easier to use than under BT's regime. In some cities American users have access to pagers with larger text storage capacity, and they subscribe to added value services to receive news headlines, sport and weather news, and latest stock market prices. The immediacy of update is very attractive, like an SMS (Short Message Service) system for mobile phones that can carry useful data would be.
This new pager works across the USA (plus Canada and Mexico, who make up NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Association), and can receive individual message of up to 300 characters, and includes all of the news services I mentioned above. It will automatically turn on to receive a page, and has a system of beeps to notify users (it seems as if this uses an alarm on the card, rather than the standard, rather unobtrusive, PalmPilot beeper).
This service is going to be a success in the States, without any doubt. The price of the card is $160, which is very competitive (the price of the service hasn't been announced, just the card), and doesn't make a significant difference to the size of a Pilot, making it similar in size to some of the older, fuller-featured pagers. Americans are used to the features offered, with one important difference: the calendar update. This is the missing link that corporate users have been waiting for: how to update a traveling managers diary without playing telephone tag. It is ironic that the PalmPilot is the PDA that has made the most of its desktop connectivity, and yet this is a breakthrough package for freeing users from their bonds to desktop PCs.
There are a couple of other new releases that make the pager card into something altogether bigger. A Belgian company, Option International (http://www.option.be ), have released an adaptor for PalmPilots to connect to a mobile phone called a Snap-On adaptor. The adaptor is intended for Nokia, Panasonic, Siemens and Ericsson mobile phones, so it may work on the Orange network as well as GSM, and it includes an SMS application. This allows a Pilot user with a mobile phone to HotSync and connect to the Internet through an ISP exactly as if using a desk bound modem, but with better battery life (Option International are claiming around 15 hours). This is neither as convenient or as interactive as the Pager card, but is a big step in the right direction for European users. I hope to have some experiences to share of using the Snap-On for future columns.
The other announcement comes from one of the small company web pages. At http://members.aol.com/gmayhak/tcl/irda.htm , Gary Mayhak and David Bowerman have an IrDA adaptor for PalmPilots. At the moment it is a hardware module only, with no software, but the potential is interesting. They give a wiring diagram to connect a Hewlett-Packard Dragonball IrDA module to a Pilot sync connector. At the moment it is only dreaming, but being able to sync to a desktop system just by resting your Pilot on the desk for a couple of minutes gets over the biggest nuisance of the Pilot cradle: there is still one button too many to press. I could easily imagine being able to connect for a quick Sync, or email download, just by sitting in a room that also has a network connected laptop with IrDA port.
Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: December 3, 1997