Gadgets for the geek set
PalmOne's success last year with the Treo 600 smart phone--with its full set of tiny but usable thumb keys--has helped give new life to the keyboard. Now competitors are arriving with their own novel approaches to typing.
Hoopla surrounds smart phones because of the innovations they bring. But the remarkably small devices serve a remarkably small market. "The vast majority of consumers have no clue what they would do with one," says Alex Slawsby at market researchers IDC. Smart phones have mostly appealed to those who already carry hand-held computers, a market of only 10 million units a year worldwide. The result: Of the 620 million wireless phones projected to be sold this year, perhaps 18 million will be smart.
No doubt, they accomplish a lot besides voice calls--wireless E-mail, instant messaging, address and calendar syncing, and even photos and videos. But they're expensive--the Treo is $400 with a service contract. The phones are also tough to use. The increasingly high-resolution screens still display only limited information at a time, so there's lots of clicking and scrolling to get at the smarts inside. Entering data into the phones while on the road is difficult--handwriting recognition is too clumsy for E-mail, and Americans don't like triple-punching number buttons to type letters.
Special software is what makes the Treo 600's tiny QWERTY board work, monitoring which key was pressed the longest when several are mashed at once. The new Treo 650 being announced this week will have flatter keys, replacing the humpback ones that irked some users. (Other grief relief: a removable battery and data that don't die with a battery.)
Sony Ericsson, meanwhile, took a hideaway approach to letters on its new p910a, whose price awaits carrier announcements. The keyboard is hidden behind the phone's number pad, which flips open to reveal a full QWERTY bank. But using the keyboard takes two hands, unlike the one-handed thumbing that's possible on the Treo.
A more intriguing keyboard comes from Research In Motion, which first popularized small QWERTY keyboards in its BlackBerrys. The new 7100t ($200 from T-Mobile with contract) has a keyboard integrated into the phone keypad, resulting in buttons that each have two letters (and a number or punctuation mark). RIM's SureType software guesses which letter is right as a key is pressed. It takes more getting used to than the Treo and Sony Ericsson full keyboards. Also, RIM aims the 7100t at E-mail users, so there's no camera and few downloadable programs. -David LaGesse
This story appears in the November 1, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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