Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Is that little black box just "fashion technology" -- or the future face of computing?
Mar 10, 1998 | "Damn fashion technology." That's what a friend of mine says when someone whips out a Pilot to jot down a phone number. The Pilot (or PalmPilot; its name changed recently) is what all the geeks are carrying this year: a palm-sized digital organizer that you can write on with a little plastic stylus. My friend sounds a little contemptuous of it, like he'd die before he'd keep his addresses in his little black box. But press him and he'll confess: He's got to have one.
This could just be trendiness among the geeks. A Web designer I know says that whenever she goes to a meeting, out come the Pilots. (Including hers, of course.) The style-driven hunger for new toys that keeps the Sharper Image catalog in business may account for the Pilot's success. If so, it will pass. Next year at this time, the toy of the moment will be something else, and you'll find Pilots for sale at garage sales, stuck in the back of desk drawers or as found objects in multimedia art exhibits.
But I wouldn't put money on this. Something profound is going on with the Pilot. A year ago, the Pilot retailed for $300. Today's model, with nearly the same features, retails for $240. In the mad Moore's-Law world of computer hardware, where capacity-per-dollar doubles every 18 months and yesterday's high-speed disk drive is today's doorstop, a product that loses only 20 percent of its retail price over a year is on to something. (Success like this is catnip to Microsoft, which is readying a Pilot-like computer of its own.)
Without selling it as anything more than a nifty personal organizer, 3Com (nee U.S. Robotics) has snuck a new kind of computer into our lives. It's a truly personal computer, one that you can carry around everywhere you go and use whenever you need to. Other manufacturers, notably Apple, have promised to change the world with portable computing before. 3Com hasn't promised anything of the kind. But the Pilot doesn't know that, so it's delivering anyway.
The Pilot's secret is that it just plain works. And it works for the simplest of reasons: There's nothing seriously wrong with it. Any photographer will tell you that the essence of making a good photograph is not doing any one of 20 different things wrong: Keep it in focus, set the aperture properly, don't jiggle the camera, watch out for backlighting and so on, and the end result will be a decent picture.
The designers and engineers responsible for the Pilot have done the same thing. It's not too expensive. It isn't too big. It doesn't try to do too many things. It doesn't have a keyboard that's too small to use. It doesn't eat batteries. Dumping all of the information out of a Pilot into your computer isn't an ordeal -- it's almost effortless. It's not hard to learn to write on it, and once you've learned, the Pilot tends not to make silly mistakes. And if the built-in address book and notepad don't work for you, you're not stuck with them: There are hundreds of third-party programs available for the Pilot.
The Pilot is a portable computer that works because there's no reason for it not to work. And this makes it useful in ways that computers have never been useful before.
