The Palmtop Computer

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FOR years, your itinerant correspondent toted a palmtop computer, rather than a laptop, to do his e-mail as well as to file stories while on his peregrinations abroad. The first pocket-size computer he bought back in the late 1980s was a diminutive DOS machine made by Sharp of Japan. It weighed under a pound (454 grams), had a tiny six-inch (15cm) monochrome screen, a two-thirds-size qwerty keyboard, a painfully slow dial-up modem, and a rechargeable battery that lasted for just about 12 hours. Though limited in performance, it got the job done—and was an easy compromise to accept when laptops and their paraphernalia weighed in at over 12lb.

When, after a decade of use and abuse, the trusty little Sharp finally broke beyond repair, it was replaced with a more up-to-date equivalent made by Hewlett-Packard of California. Likewise, the HP Jornada 720 weighed little more than a pound, had a two-thirds-size keyboard, a battery life of around 12 hours, and could be slipped just as readily into an inside pocket. 

With higher resolution and colour, the HP palmtop’s six-inch touchscreen could handle graphics as well as text. Its pared-down version of Microsoft Windows allowed it to sync files with Microsoft Office and Outlook on a server or desktop PC. And a wireless card gave it instant access to the internet whenever an open WiFi signal was within range. An active developer community devoted to the platform provided, invariably for free, all the applications, utilities and games needed to make life easier still. The Jornada 720 became such a faithful companion that your correspondent even slept with it under his pillow at night, allowing messages from half a world away to be read and answered while still half asleep.

After another decade of heavy use, the little HP palmtop has now packed up irreparably, too. Apart from a few kanji-character machines made for the Japanese domestic market, there is nothing available today that could take the Jornada 720’s place. While easy to slip into a pocket, and fine for texting, or even composing the odd e-mail, smart phones with slide-out keyboards, like the Samsung Epic 4G or the Motorola Droid 2, are much too cramped for more than an hour or so of continuous use. 

Attractive as it may be, Apple’s popular iPad tablet is not the solution either. It is too heavy (1.5lb) and bulky (7.5 inches by 9.6 inches) to slip into a pocket for use on the hoof. Also, the tablet’s large, unprotected screen makes it somewhat fragile. 

Yes, Apple sells a protective case for the iPad. You can even buy a docking stand and external keyboard for it as well—and that is needed, because although virtual keyboards are adequate for making notes, mechanical keyboards, with their double-sprung keys and shock-stops, are essential for serious typing. But the question then becomes, why bother when all you are going to finish up with is a piece of luggage as cumbersome as a laptop? You might as well carry a mini-notebook like a MacBook Air and have done with the crippled operating system and limited features of an iPad. 

No, if your correspondent is to accept the limitations of a dumbed-down computer based on a mobile-phone operating system—whether Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 or HP’s webOS 2.0—then the device itself had better be properly pocketable. In other words, no more than five inches wide. 

At two-thirds the width of an iPad, such a device could be carried in a jacket pocket with little difficulty. A form factor that size (say, 4.8 inches by 6.5 inches) would provide more than enough room for a screen measuring seven inches along a diagonal. That, in fact, is precisely the screen size most of the computer and mobile-phone makers rushing out tablet PCs (including Acer, Asustek, Cisco, Dell, HTC, Motorola, Research In Motion and Samsung) have focused on.

Earlier this week, Apple’s combative boss, Steve Jobs, heaped ridicule on all the seven-inch tablets poised to enter the market for being both too big and too small (the iPad has a 9.7-inch screen). “Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smart phone and too small to compete with the iPad,” he told investors at Apple’s quarterly meeting on October 18th. “The current crop of seven-inch tablets are going to be dead on arrival.”

Mr Jobs allowed that rivals could always increase the resolution of their displays to compensate for the smaller screen area. But that would be meaningless, he insisted, unless the new seven-inch tablets came with sandpaper—“so users can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.” Your correspondent had no trouble using his little finger on his palmtop’s six-inch touchscreen when the stylus went AWOL. 

Perhaps more than anything, Mr Jobs’s sarcasm reveals how concerned he really is about both the coming avalanche of seven-inch tablets and the 3.0 version (Gingerbread) of the Android operating system that most of them will sport. He swears that Apple never had a seven-inch iPad in the works. If it did—as component suppliers in Taiwan insist—you can see why Mr Jobs would want to bury it, at least for the time being. The iPad may not have been the blockbuster product market watchers had anticipated. Even so, an impressive 7.5m units have been bought since it was launched five months ago. Introducing a smaller, cheaper version at this stage would only cannibalise existing iPad sales. At the moment, Apple's profit margins on the iPad, especially the more expensive models, are truly humongous.

Besides, it has been difficult enough getting “apps” for the iPhone rewritten so they can work properly on the iPad’s much larger screen. Introducing yet another screen size would mean that three versions of iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, would then be in circulation, each with its own developer needs. Mr Jobs has savaged Android, the iPhone’s nemesis, for fragmenting into multiple versions, as each phone maker adopting Google’s open operating system has implemented a different set of features to differentiate its products. Writing apps like the Twitter client (TweetDeck) for Android phones, Mr Jobs insisted earlier this week, “presents developers with a daunting challenge.” Not so, TweetDeck’s chief executive fired back. Apparently, TweetDeck needed only two programmers to do the job.

But Mr Job’s most pressing problem is protecting the iPad’s profit margin. The most expensive part of the device is its 9.7-inch screen. According to iSuppli, a market research company based in Los Angeles, the entry-level iPad (which sells for $499 in America) costs around $260 to make, with the multi-touch screen accounting for $95. 

With half the display area, a seven-inch touchscreen should cost less than $50. All told, analysts reckon a seven-inch tablet based on Android should be over $100 cheaper to make than a basic iPad. That means it could retail (with a comparable profit margin) for $299. If tied to a two-year data contract, a seven-inch Android tablet could even be given away by mobile carriers for free. It won't, of course—at least not while early adopters have shown themselves willing to pay top dollar for tablets that are still something of a novelty. 

Verizon, America's largest mobile carrier, is racing to cash in before the fad fades. It is expected to charge $599 for the Samsung Galaxy Tab when it goes on sale in November, with an additional $20 a month for a one-gigabyte data plan. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have yet to announce their plans and prices for the Samsung tablet.

Obviously, such profit margins (approaching 100%) are not going to survive the flood of tablets due early next year. Even Apple will be forced to slash iPad prices when the early adopters have been catered for and tablets are ten a penny—just as it did a year after the iPhone was launched and the euphoria had worn off. In the meantime, Mr Jobs will continue to trash the competition in a bid to maintain the iPad's profit margins and market share for as long as possible. But say what he will, the trend in tablets is now towards seven-inch models like Samsung's.

More than anything your correspondent has seen so far, the Samsung tablet actually comes closest to being a worthy replacement for his dead palmtop. It boasts an expandable memory slot, front- and rear-facing cameras, a speaker-phone and a removable battery (none of which the iPad possesses) as well as the usual 3G cellular radio for data communications plus WiFi, Bluetooth and a DLNA connection for sharing digital photos, music and videos. Like all Android devices, the Galaxy Tab is a proper multi-tasking computer capable of running several programs at once (the iPad is due to get background processing later this month, though not true multi-tasking). And at 13 ounces, the Samsung tablet is half the weight of a comparably equipped iPad. 

What your correspondent does not like about the Samsung tablet, nor the rest of its ilk, is the lack of a slide-out qwerty keyboard. There are many applications where a virtual keyboard is acceptable—sales and marketing, education and field work, for example. And an on-screen keyboard is perfect for interacting with content on the web. Alas, it makes a terrible typing tool. Somehow, as pretty and clever as it may be, your correspondent does not see himself sleeping with a Samsung.

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