Handheld Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Once upon a time, I could pull a small com­put­er from my pock­et while sit­ting in a cafe and use it to check my email, write blog posts and short sto­ries, update my resume, and cre­ate invoic­es for clients. I’m not even talk­ing about my New­ton, which stretched cred­i­bil­i­ty to call pock­etable. No, all these things could be done and done well by my old Palm Tungsten|T3, which I bought in 2003. If truth be told, most of those tasks could be done almost as well as the Palm IIIxe I had a decade ago.

Today I have an iPhone, which excels for read­ing email. Writ­ing email? Not so much. It is worlds bet­ter than the Palm for look­ing things up on the Web and the iPhone’s music play­er is fan­tas­tic. There is a much wider array of appli­ca­tions that make fart nois­es or which dis­play the pic­ture of a cig­a­rette lighter for hold­ing up at met­al con­certs with­out vio­lat­ing fire codes.

The two para­graphs above, how­ev­er, took me more than a half hour to enter. On my old Palm, even with­out the wire­less key­board or the built-in key­board of the Treo, it would have tak­en five min­utes, includ­ing stop­ping to think what to write. With the wire­less key­board, I once wrote 1400 words of a sto­ry in an hour and a half. The words-per-minute rate is unim­pres­sive unless you con­sid­er that the time includes my paus­es to think or get refills of my coffee.

Such pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is unthink­able with the iPhone, which is the advance­ment sup­posed to make us for­get all about the prim­i­tive options that came before. Unthink­able. This despite the fact that the hard­ware us much more capa­ble than that of the Pal­mOS devices now con­sid­ered obsolete.

Why would this be? I can think of two rea­sons. First is the removal of the sty­lus. Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone by telling us we would be freed from the sty­lus. At the time, the promise sound­ed much like telling car­pen­ters they would be freed from ham­mers by the inven­tion of the intu­itive bare-hands tech­nique for dri­ving nails. Sev­er­al months with the iPhone’s vir­tu­al key­board has­n’t changed my opinion.

The oth­er rea­son? Soft­ware. Apple dis­cour­ages soft­ware devel­op­ers from cre­at­ing appli­ca­tions with too much func­tion­al­i­ty. With a word proces­sor and a wire­less key­board (they exist, sure, but Apple has dis­abled the capa­bil­i­ty for the Blue­tooth trans­ceiv­er to inter­face with such a device. Some spec­u­la­tion exists that this may change in the next revi­sion, but I’m not hold­ing by breath. Apple fears that sales of small, inex­pen­sive devices could under­mine sales of MacBooks.

That fear is well-found­ed. After all, if I did­n’t want this device to replace a lap­top, I would­n’t be com­plain­ing. There are lots of rea­sons to use a lap­top, but tak­ing notes or writ­ing in a cof­feeshop real­ly aren’t among them. A lap­top can be car­ried pret­ty eas­i­ly, but they still take up an inor­di­nate amount of space in com­par­i­son to an iPhone, even when you add in a portable keyboard.

I see only a glim­mer of hope in the new Palm Pre smart­phone due to be released in the next cou­ple days. The built-in key­board is a step in the right direc­tion, for sure, so being unable to use a sty­lus with the device may not be the end I the world. I find it hard to imag­ine that the Pre would ship incom­pat­i­ble with wire­less key­boards. How­ev­er, the whole premise of the new oper­at­ing sys­tem is to work almost exclu­sive­ly in «the Cloud». That may lend itself to tra­di­tion­al uses, but it’s unlike­ly to give us much beyond bet­ter cal­en­dars. Palm has tak­en Apple’s cue at least in that they are mak­ing a bet­ter phone, instead of a hand­held device with a phone built in. Even the Treo line real­ly are hand­held com­put­ers with phone hard­ware and soft­ware for run­ning phones almost clum­si­ly added on.

So what is the future of hand­held com­put­ing? I may start car­ry­ing a Palm device again, though car­ry­ing a Palm device and an iPhone seems some­what ridicu­lous. I think we have to look to net­books and the con­tin­u­a­tion of the release of lighter and thin­ner note­books. It would be won­der­ful to see small­er, tablet-based com­put­ers appear­ing, but I’m guess­ing we have to wait anoth­er decade before we catch up to the devices of a decade ago. We move for­ward in so many areas, it seems trag­ic to ignore our past achievements.

Then again, per­haps I’m just being impa­tient. There is only so much advance­ment we can make with­out slow­ing to adjust and let our reg­u­lar prac­tices catch up with our achieve­ments. After walk­ing on the Moon, we put almost all our efforts into putting peo­ple in orbit a cou­ple hun­dred miles up instead of a cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand miles up. Going to the Moon by itself did­n’t do much for us, but it put us firm­ly on a path which will even­tu­al­ly bring us back there, if only we keep build­ing a piece at a time until it becomes the next small step instead of the next giant leap.

Sent from my iPhone in a cof­feeshop, where it took a lit­tle more than an hour and a half to write.