Oddball Wireless Devices
by David Sims and Derrick Story10/19/2001
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. We find that's never more true than when we're reviewing new wireless gizmos that are in the works -- or worse, already on the streets.
In this article, we take a peek at two devices worthy of a raised eyebrow or two. First, Dave Sims looks at the Motorola V100, which attempts to incorporate cell phone capability into the body of a text pager. Then Derrick Story checks out the Parafone Springboard module for Visor Handspring devices that allows you to use your PDA as a cordless 900-MHz phone.
In our opinion, one of these devices seems a little more practical than the other. Which one? Read on and discover for yourself.
The V100: The promise and failure of convergence
Devices with just one purpose usually have great interfaces. Consider your toaster, or a dial telephone.
Every time you add a function to a device, the interface becomes just that much more complicated. Toaster ovens add dials and switches, and phones with redial and speed dial have more complex interfaces. You've probably been asked by at least one grandparent to help figure those out.
Design engineers keep adding functions and complicating the interface until it becomes so multipurposed that it isn't optimized for anything. Suddenly nothing is easy, and at some point someone adds the function that is like the final straw breaking the camel's back.
When I first heard that Motorola was sticking a mobile phone into its text pager, I thought it sounded great -- not unlike a toaster oven or a phone with speed dial. We gadget lovers are stuffing more and more black-and-silver appliances into our pockets and onto our belts. Convergence offers the promise that we may be able to carry fewer devices without giving up any functionality.
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But after a few weeks carrying the V100, I saw that like several other converged devices, it suffers from trying to jam too many functions into too small a device. It's not that the electronics don't fit, but the interface remains optimized as a text pager. The GSM phone they've packaged inside appears to be (as indeed, it is) an afterthought -- awkward to use and demanding tradeoffs that only early adopters are likely to endure.
Where's the phone again?
The V100 is one of several converged devices Motorola's showing this fall; others include a phone with an FM radio and some with PIM (personal information manager) features to compete with Palm OS devices.
The V100 takes the popular text pager form -- a device with a tiny QWERTY keyboad and a screen with several lines of text -- and almost invisibly slips the guts of a GSM phone into it. But to do that, Motorola has skipped the speaker and the microphone -- which have, traditionally, been pretty basic elements of the telephone. To use this one, you have to plug in a hands-free set.
My experience with hands-free sets is they're good if you're setting up the call: plug them in before you back out of the driveway. They're not so good if someone's calling you, because it's a real hassle to find the phone and cord, plug them together, and take the call -- and it's that much harder if you're speeding away from a toll booth.
A numbers game
But let's say no one ever calls you, and you have to initiate your own calls. The V100 is still difficult to use. One button has an icon of an envelope on it (for getting email) and another has an icon of a pen on paper (for writing email). But there's no button with a phone on it, and there should be.
Patience and experimentation with menus will reveal that you can enter a phone number by tapping on the keys labeled with letters and numbers, and then dial it by tapping the OK key.
But the tiny QWERTY keyboard just isn't optimized for phone users. Here's another example of how: Let's say one of the numbers you like to call is the voicemail system at your office. Once I'm into mine, it asks me to press "P" to play the first message. By "P", the system really wants me to hit my "7" key, the one with "PRS" on it. But the 7-key on the V100's keypad is also the Z-key of its QWERTY keyboard. The P-key on the V100 is way off on the top right of the QWERTY keyboard, where it would be very handy if I were typing an email. So while my voicemail system waits, I'm trying to recall the numbers above the keypad on every phone I've used over the past 30 years -- and finding it more time-consuming than I would like.
Maybe in another life
The disconnect between me and the V100 may have as much to do with my preferences as with its shortcomings. I carry a mobile phone and use it often. What appealed to me was the notion of having a full keyboard on my phone so I could use it to compose short email messages, which I find painful to tap out on a 10-key pad.
But the V100 is less a mobile phone with a keyboard than it is a text pager with an auxiliary phone. A colleage of mine, who relies on his text pager and doesn't own a mobile phone, might have found it a more appropriate balance of interface tradeoffs. But for now, I'll have to stick with my phone, or look toward one that supports graffiti.
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