The audio 3-in-1 that combined radio, cassette tape, and compact disc was an instant success in the nineties. The younger generation was moving to stereophonic quality CD sound yet wanted “legacy support” for all its favourite audio cassette collections. The older generation found the radio in 3-in-1 of value, while listening to “Radio Sangeet Sammelan” type music concerts or “News at 9” from All India Radio. A similar 3-in-1 functionality device is round the corner and it will be a spectacular success over the next few years.
The way an average user uses a Personal Digital Assistant, a cellular phone, and email today is to use three different pieces of hardware. The Treo Communicator 180 introduced in November 2001 by Handspring — the company co-founded by Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot — is likely to change all that. The new generation 3-in-1 — cellular phone, PDA and email/browsing — integrates all three into one sleek piece that resembles today’s cellular phone or a PDA and far exceeds the utility of any of the individual pieces of hardware.
Powered by a Motorola Dragon-ball processor and with 16 MB of memory, Treo 180 has enough horsepower to serve as a useful organiser. It uses the friendly, simpler, and intuitive “small footprint” Palm operating system and runs all useful programs such as Address Book, Calender, To Do List etc. The lithium ion rechargeable battery is particularly useful with a comfortable 2.5 hours of talk time and 60 hours of offline use. Treo uses the dual frequency (900 MHz/1900 MHz) GSM that makes it useful across Asia, Europe, and most parts of America. The 160 x 160 pixel display is cool for viewing text and graphics and the backlit display is useful too.
Weighing less than 150 grams, Treo is handy both in size and weight. With a built-in 9,600 Kbps modem, Treo doubles up as an email/Internet browsing station with the added convenience of being mobile. The “Blazer” wireless browser lets you browse practically all sites and not merely those sites optimised for wireless. Unlike many PDAs that added a cellular phone function as an after thought, Treo has integration at the design level: high quality audio, speaker phone, headphone functionality, speed dial, switch to vibration mode etc, all of which you would expect from a quality cellular phone manufacturer today. The built-in keyboard lets you enter text effortlessly, yet another ‘feather in the cap’ for Treo. Of course, if you are a great graffiti writing fan, you can choose Treo’s 180g model that offers the Graffiti support that many Palm users have got used to.
The integration becomes extremely useful when you can look up the address book of the organiser and call right away, instead of re-entering the number from the PDA into the cellular phone (a nuisance we are all used to). Similarly, all incoming call numbers can get stored in your address book. You can download address books from any other Palm 0/S device using sync cable or Infrared; synchronise information (e-mail, contacts, address books) with any PC running Microsoft Outlook. Checking POP3 mail is a one-step process. Of course, you need a data capable GSM service provider. The integration of cellular phone and browsing leads to an interesting application — send email address through SMS message that another Treo device can immediately ‘cut and paste’ into the e-mail program. Through third party software, you can get documents to go with you, most importantly MS Word, Power point and Excel files.
The browser supports many features though JavaScript support is not available yet. Yahoo Instant messenger, SSL encryption, promise of a colour version in mid 2002, and future support for GPRS make this product even more exciting. Priced at $399 with an obligation to sign up for service for a year or at $599 without service sign-up obligations, Handspring Treo is a promising product with great features, implemented well, and with a high level of integration across the three functions of PDA, cell phone and e-mail/Net browser. Over the next couple of years this Comdex 2001 Award winning product will change the history of Internet appliances as decisively as Palm Pilot (created by Jeff Hawkins) did in the early nineties.
Does it mean anything to India today? Thanks to the IT boom, Internet service providers, and the opening up of the telecom market, a growing teenage population in India takes email, cellular phone, and PDA for granted. Our Internet subscriber base of two million, active email IDs of ten million, cellular phone base of five million, PC base of seven million, wire-line phone base of 25 million, and TV population of 50 million are far short of the numbers that many countries enjoy even in Asia (let alone Europe or the US); yet they do reflect a changing trend. The new generation 3-in-1 such as a Handspring Communicator Treo 180 will have a profound impact on Indian markets too, though over time.
Professor S Sadagopan is the Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. The views expressed here are personal. He can be contacted at askss@iiitb.ac.in
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