A computer you can use standing up

By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead

What’s wrong with PDA’s?

They’re too small. They’re too business-oriented. The good, light, powerful ones are too expensive. The cheap ones don’t have WiFi or good speakers. They don’t use a desktop OS.

We e-book readers need a computer we can use standing up. There’s just too much wrong with PDA’s.

Too small. A PDA screen is too small to display the full width of a web-page, too small to enjoy video, too small to show enough words on a page. The Nokia 770 has a screen width of 800 pixels, compared to 320 for a Palm. It has 384,000 pixels, the Palm a mere 153,600. We just need more screen real estate than a PDA has.

Sure a PDA is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Honestly, I’ve never seen a single person carry their PDA there. And my paperbacks are too big to fit in a shirt pocket too, but that’s never seemed a handicap before.

Too business-oriented. People want good speakers to listen to music, internet radio. For those videos, too. They want drawing and image-editing applications. Programming languages (python on the 770). Games. Addresses and phone numbers? Got ‘em on my phone, dude. Connection to Outlook? Hey, it’s gmail I need.

This isn’t just my viewpoint. Newsweek points out 1.2 million paying subscribers to MLB.com to download video snippets of baseball games, 100,000 movie downloads from a single site monthly, 5 million viewers who watched the Live 8 concert on AOL instead of MTV. Gotta have WiFi for that. Who wants to watch/listen/play from your desk?

Too expensive. I can get a Sony PlayStation Portable for $227. A full-size computer with LCD goes for as low as $299. A PalmOne LifeDrive is $499.

OK, there’s some exaggeration here.

But the point is there’s a market for a device that falls between the PDA and the TabletPC, a touchscreen handheld with a desktop OS. Of course, I want it for reading e-books. We’ve seen specialized e-book readers, and they don’t cut it because, let’s face it, we all really want to do something more with our e-book reader than just read an e-book. Even my radio is more than a radio — it’s a clock, it’s a CD player. I want portability, sure, but I want more.

A full OS. Bill Gates, at WinHEC in April, spoke about portability from a different perspective. He sees the need to be able to just get a read on what’s going on now, while you’re not at your desk. He says you don’t want a notebook, but some sort of auxiliary device. “When somebody is in an elevator, you sometimes see them opening up their laptop, trying to boot it up to see what the meeting room is they were supposed to go to, that’s kind of a painful thing,” Gates said.

He went on: “Almost nobody would have that [ultra mobile] as their only PC, but have it be complementary to their PC, and then have all their states, the same applications, be able to carry that around, we think that’s very attractive.” He added that, in that “whole spectrum of devices …. we think the hottest will be that ultra mobile PC.”

A carry-around computer running a full OS, with regular apps, isn’t a PDA. And there’s a need for it — a computer you can use standing up, like the Japan-only Sony U101 shown here. We’ve seen WebPads, we’ve seen the OQO and other $2000 miniature computers. They’re still missing the niche — “as close to one pound” and “hopefully in the $800 range,” Gates said. Actually we want in the under-$400 range, like the 770.

And you know that when we have that, the computer we can carry around, not a PDA, and use standing up, we’ll have our e-book reader too.