Monday, Nov. 23, 1998

Geared To Go

By Anita Hamilton

Travelers have a love-hate relationship with the gadgets they stuff into bags, pockets, briefcases and suitcases to bring on the road. They love the convenience of a cell phone, but they hate the high price of calls. They love the idea of sending e-mail to friends from Bali but hate hunting down the converter they need to plug into a foreign phone jack. Still, they keep coming back for more.

Their patience has been amply rewarded. While all the miniaturized circuitry of mobile devices can be temperamental, wireless technology has never been more elegant or convenient. It can be cheaper too. This year many of the advances have been incremental, but some have been dazzling. The color screen for the Game Boy, for example, is a nice enhancement to a wildly popular product, but the new breed of slim, 3-lb. notebooks breaks new ground and sets a design standard for computing on the go.

A few years back, in fact, notebook computers were hardly pleasant travel companions. Heavy and pricey, these 6-to-8-lb. bricks were a nuisance. With the advent of the 3-lb., $2,000 "ultraportables," like Sony's Vaio 505 and Toshiba's Portege 3010CT, comes new "executive cachet," says analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies. He expects this category to account for 20% of all notebook sales over the next few years. The new "Jupiter class" notebooks that run on the Windows CE operating system are just as svelte but cost a mere $1,000. They can run only limited "pocket" versions of Windows applications, but their long, 10-to-12-hr. battery life and low cost make them a good fit for lots of mobile workers.

Selections in the handheld market have blossomed as well. Last year the obvious choice for a fully functional pocket-size organizer was 3Com's PalmPilot. While this year's upgrade, the Palm III, is still going strong, buyers can now find comparable units from Casio, Everex and Philips that run Windows CE. The competition has brought great new features like wireless data transfer on the Palm III and a voice-memo feature on Casio's Cassiopeia. The research firm IDC predicts that by 2002, U.S. handheld sales will triple to 6.9 million units--about the same number of notebooks sold in the U.S. this year. Why are consumers so keen on handhelds? While failed products like the Apple Newton tried to handle too many tasks, says IDC analyst Jill House, today's handhelds perform just a few basic organizing functions extremely well.

Adhering to the mantra that simpler is better, cell phones and pagers have always had one primary function, respectively, but they got even better at it in 1998. The launch of Iridium's worldwide satellite paging and cellular-phone service was the flashiest advance, but the new low-cost calling plans (of just 10[cents] to 15[cents] a minute) on regular cell phones will do much more to increase their use. The Yankee Group predicts that these lower-priced calling plans will bump up average cell-phone usage, from three to five hours a month, by 2007. Pagers, on the other hand, are already cheap, but they've broadened their appeal with flashy colors for teens and two-way messaging for business users.

Other single-function devices, such as digital cameras, electronic books and digital voice recorders, are struggling to find their way. All promise to do an even better job than their film, paper or tape counterparts someday, but only digital cameras are approaching that goal by finally matching the print quality of film cameras in sub-$1,000 models.

The most intriguing new portable device is Diamond Multimedia's Rio, a $200 handheld digital music player that stores up to 60 min. of CD-quality sound downloaded from the Internet. The Rio still has a long way to go--it's more bother than joy to spend 10 min. per song downloading what little mainstream music you can find online in the special format the Rio requires. Yet the idea of hand-picking songs from a vast online database, then bringing your favorites on a jog, the morning commute or to a lengthy session with the dentist is irresistible.

The Rio is years away from becoming a mainstream product, but its cool factor is, well, really cool. In the end, that's the essential ingredient in any mobile gadget's success. Why else would we put up with cell phones that drop calls and notebook screens that become unreadable in the sunlight? Because when they work right, we love them so much we'd take them anywhere--even to Bali.