The Future of Handhelds

Stefani Lako Baldwin has an interesting rant against handhelds such as the Palm, The BlackBerry plague cometh.

On the one hand, I am definitely in the target market for the current generation of handhelds — I carry around my life in my Palm III. In fact I accidentally left my Palm in my father-in-law’s car and in the week it took to get it back my wife was laughing at my difficulties coping without it.

On the other hand, Baldwin is correct that the current generation of handhelds probably aren’t all that exciting except to uber geeks. But I received an important lesson on technology over the weekend from my mother of all people. A couple months ago I passed along an old P133 that was collecting dust, and this weekend was the first chance I found to go to her house and set up the machine. To my surprise in the intervening weeks she’d gone out and bought a top of the line scanner, printer, speakers and a ton of other stuff. This from the woman who probably thought I was a bit insane when I bugged her constantly until she broke down and bought me a VIC-20 for my birthday one year.

No, the Palm is not quite as rudimentary as the VIC-20 was, but today’s handhelds still are not much past the Commodore 64 stage in terms of ease of use. My wife is pretty technologically savvy, but I don’t think she’d put up with some of the hoops I have had to jump through occasionally to get my Palm working like I want.

But at the rate these things are improving, give the market another 3-5 years and I am sure we will see a handheld that even my mom could love.

Source:

The BlackBerry plague cometh. Upside.Com, Stefani Lako Baldwin, Sept. 05, 2000.

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