Up Close and Personal With Hand-Held PCs

April 13, 1997

By BRUCE WEBER

In this age of advancing technology, life gets more complicated as it gets easier. Sure, you can walk the streets, split town or even climb a mountain and never be out of touch. But you have to carry the phone or at least the pager. I don't get this; I have enough trouble with keys, wallet and sunglasses.
Still, I'm not a Luddite, and I'm capable of being thrilled by electronic tricks. So I tried four hand-held personal computers (HPC's), or palmtops, as they're called. Two were about $200: the Pilot 5000 from U.S. Robotics and the Sidekick Personal Organizer RFS 51MB from Franklin, both about the size of a back-pocket wallet. The two others, the Cassiopeia A-10 from Casio and the Zaurus ZR-3500X from Sharp, cost $400 to $500. They have a wider range of functions and are the size of, say, a small paperback. All of them struck me as, on the one hand, incredibly cool - the stuff they can do! - and, on the other, incredibly nerdy, the equivalent of a shirt pocket full of pens.

It didn't help my confidence that most of the palmtops' instruction manuals begin with warnings about losing stored data. And, of course, you can lose the machine; one guy I know says he bought two, one as a backup. Nonetheless, I persevered. And, after a month or so, I admit it was fun becoming conversant (to a degree) with hand-held technology. There was one moment, as I was lying in bed trying to sleep off the flu, when I managed to fax a message to the office - without a fax machine. (The Zaurus I had, which has a built-in modem, can do this.) I thought: well, that whets my appetite.

Two of these machines can also send and receive E-mail (the exceptions are the Sidekick and the Pilot; the latter needs an upgrade card to do it), but the learning curve is fairly steep. On the other hand, I know how frustrating it can be to stay in touch with people between flights. Palmtop technology allows you to pick up E-mail at LaGuardia, write your responses in the air and then send them all at the instant of debarkation at O'Hare. (To make connections even easier, this month Sharp is introducing "radio mail" ability to the Zaurus ZR-5800, allowing the user to send E-mail via a "wireless modem," or radio transmitter, bypassing phone lines altogether.)

What I was trying to figure out was which palmtop was best for me. I just don't have occasion to do spreadsheets on the subway or keep vast files on hand wherever I go. In fact, several users I spoke with raved about the palmtops for their mundane roles as address books and schedule organizers; several others said they used features like alarms, international clocks and calculators, but not the advanced features (word processing, note taking, document storage) that allow high-end palmtops to function more like laptops.

Still, all of these devices come with software that allows them to hook up to your home or work computer and assure that the information in their shared files is consistent; this is useful if your palmtop battery runs out unexpectedly, or if you lose the unit itself. This capability also means that if you spend the day making notes, taking numbers and arranging appointments, you can keep your records straight. And if you work at home frequently, as I do, you can transfer your work to the palmtop and carry it around.

Of course, the quality that makes the palmtop valuable is its size. You don't have to lug it; you slip it into your vest pocket. But a delicate balance exists between shrinkage and utility; who, after all, wants a wristwatch television? In fact, the palmtops, with the exception of the Sidekick, have a similar problem: reading the screens requires a pretty good squint. On the other hand, the Sidekick has a small screen and large display characters, so although the data are easily read, there's never very much visible.

Size also makes loading information more difficult. Because the keys are small, and because more commands are needed than can be accommodated by a tiny keyboard, many palmtops are equipped with a stylus. (The Sidekick isn't.)

A stylus is pretty ingenious. It is the equivalent of a mouse; you tap icons on the screen with it. In fact, the Pilot doesn't even have a separate keyboard; it simulates one on the screen, and you operate it with the stylus.

With the Zaurus, the stylus allows you to write directly on the screen and save your notes. You can type them later, if your handwriting is legible enough. (Mine turns out not to be - three days after I was illustrating this function for a friend, I called up the stored document, and it looked like a child's scribblings on an Etch-A-Sketch.)

Or, with the Pilot, you can learn to write in a script the palmtop understands. The computer will recognize certain stylus strokes as letters; if you write on the screen in its language, it will translate it into typed characters. This function is amazing, but frankly, I'd rather learn Spanish. To be fair, a month isn't really enough time to get to know four different machines. But I gave each a good shot, carrying it around for a few days, transferring the crucial entries from my Rolodex (talk about antediluvian!) onto it, dutifully keeping track of my schedule electronically and exploring its abilities.

One insight I had was that complex palmtops are best for frequent travelers, particularly those who must maintain a lot of records but do not require heavy word processing. The fax moment in my sickbed was revelatory in that regard. For that and other reasons, I preferred the Zaurus to the Cassiopeia, which doesn't have a built-in modem and requires an attachment to fax.

To send a fax on the Zaurus, I had to subscribe to Compuserve, which is Zaurus's service provider. In addition to faxing, the Zaurus allows you, rather easily, to E-mail and to get weather reports and stock updates. However, you can access only Internet text, not graphics, on the Zaurus. You can access both with the Cassiopeia, but the software has to be loaded on a desktop computer with a CD-ROM first.

More important, the Zaurus is easier to read. The characters are bolder, and the screen itself, though smaller, has better backlighting. Second, the keyboard is more responsive; you can almost (but not quite) type on the Zaurus normally. And third, I find its independently operating software, with all of the functions displayed in permanent icons, more accessible than Windows (though the Zaurus is Windows-compatible).

On the lower end, the Pilot was useful as an address book and scheduler. Because the Pilot has no keyboard, loading information into it one letter at a time is a genuine pain. However, I was able to load all my names and numbers onto my laptop, then use the connecting software (the program is called Hot Sync - titillating!) to transfer it.

That function made the Pilot a reasonably convenient and capacious appointment book. That and E-mail ability (sorry, no fax) seem to be its chief advantages.

But it was probably the Sidekick, the least formidable palmtop, that impressed me most. Which is not to say it didn't have its irritations. It's hard to open, and the hasp is unpredictable. Second, I was never able to connect it to my laptop, even after I installed the connectivity software, known as Sidekick Connect; I kept getting a message on my laptop screen telling me what seemed an obvious lie: "Sidekick is not found on your system."

In spite of this, I found the Sidekick easy to use, easy to read and even easy to communicate with. Very concise instructions are printed just under the lid. The keys are tiny, but it didn't take long to become reasonably facile. Faxing, E-mail and vast document storage are beyond it, but you can add data bases with cards that click into the back. I added a dictionary with a lot of word games.

In the end, that might have been what turned my mind around on these machines. During my few days of using the Sidekick, I found myself sitting at a bar, having a drink and waiting for a friend. I slipped my Sidekick out of my pocket and began to play anagrams.

"Cool," a female voice said. "Can I play?"

When I turned, she was taking a palmtop - a Psion - from her purse. "You show me yours," she said, "and I'll show you mine."

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Bruce Weber is a metropolitan reporter for The New York Times.