Ohh, James… is that a Jornada in your pocket?

1999-09-28

It seems appropriate that scenes for the latest James Bond film, “The World is not Enough,” should be filmed at Motorola’s brand new, state of the art Integrated Circuit fabrication plant at Swindon, UK. It is equally comforting that handheld PCs should take centre stage in the film. We are up to date - things have come a long way since “Sneakers” showed an Excel spreadsheet as the front end to a Cray supercomputer.

Of course, there is one over-riding reason why HP and Microsoft were so keen to get the Jornada 430se into the frame. Product placement is seen as a hugely powerful technique for reaching the consumer market and CE-based handhelds are, after all, a consumer product. Or at least, they are becoming one. 3com’s Palm (now an entity in its own right) has focused on meeting executives’ needs (rather than their desires) – it is only recently, with the launch of the Palm V, that a sexy design has been taken on board. The target for CE devices, whilst starting life as competition for the Palm, has now moved to the mass market. The new Jornada, for example, is a Game Boy grown up – it does all that boring stuff, like scheduling and email, but one look at the literature shows that the features at the top of the list are the colour screen, the hot processor and the support for MP3.

The race is on between Palm and CE. Recently, with companies like HandSpring, Palm have started to inject some competition into their own market. The bottom line for Palm is – “it does everything you need”. There are tales of people investing in colour devices, for example, then coming back to Palm when they were fed up of shelling out on batteries. The CE community, however, are aiming straight at the jugular of the gadget man. Where better to promote this image than with the king of them all, the brits’ very own 007? Such battles have been fought before – sometimes it is the gadgety that wins; sometimes, like with the black and white Game Boy, “what you need” turns out to be the more compelling argument. As for me, a self-proclaimed gadget junkie, I’m hanging on a bit longer. Integrate a camera, mobile phone and voice recognition capability and I’ll be sold. Until then, like (I suspect) the majority of the market that CE is attempting to tackle, the high price of the fully functional devices give me ample cause to wait.

(First published 28 September 1999)