Pervasive Computing Era

Software Magazine, April, 2000 by Dan Kara

* Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)

PDAs, represented by products such as Palm Computing's Palm VII, Philips' Nino, and the HP Jornada, are perhaps the most widely employed intelligent devices. Originally these devices were exclusively used for scheduling and contact management, but lately e-mail and Web access functionality have become available via third-party add-ons. These products mostly run under Win CE and Palm OS and employ a pen interface.

* Communication Devices

The first of this class of devices, feature phones (i.e., the Qualcomm pdQ), combine traditional cell phone with contact management functionality. With additional scheduling functionality, feature phones could subsume some of the FDA market. Closely related feature phones are the smart phones such as the Noltia 9000i1 Communicator. In addition to wireless communication, smart phones provide scheduling, contact management, e-mail, and Internet access using pen input, keyboards (sometimes), and microbrowsers. Traditional cell phone and smart phone/feature phone markets are not mutually exclusive. I expect that smart phones/feature phones will begin to outsell traditional cell phones going forward, and that feature phones will vastly outsell smart phones in the near term (24 months). Also, EPOC32 will be the dominant OS in the future for these devices.

* Personal Communication

Family phone is the name applied to consumer devices that provide localized wireless communication (approximately two miles, maximum). Example family phone products include the Motorola TalkAbout Radio 250 and AudioVox Twin Pack, The devices provide the basis for the next generation of Star Trek-like, miniaturized, personal communicators, which will provide a natural language recognition (NRL) interface and local wireless communication, including device-to-device communication. While these devices are an interesting category, they will find little applicability in the corporate arena.

Development Options

Currently, most corporate development targeting intelligent, handheld devices centers on extensions to embedded organizer functionality (calendaring, contact management, etc.). The forms-based toolsets do support a type of generalizcd business application (data in/data out), but applications built with these toolsets rarely support real-time transactions and complex business logic, and have little interaction with middleware services (ORBs, MOM, transaction managers, app servers). More typically, users enter information into forms and this data is stored temporarily (disk or RAM), until it synchronizes and updates (usually a serial connection) the desktop or server that "owns" the data.

Mainstream corporate integrated development environments (IDEs) are rapidly adding functionality to support handhelds, but currently developer options are limited to 3GL IDEs and a handful of simple, forms-based toolsets.

* Palm Development Environments

As you would expect, development support for the Palm platform is strong. Palm itself offers the Palm OS Emulator for the Mac and Windows platforms, as well as the Palm OS SDK, including headers files, documentation, libraries, and samples (a separate build environment is required, however). The leading 3GL developments for Palm are Metrowerks' (Motorola) CodeWarrior and Feras Information Technology's CASL, both project-based IDEs. Rounding out the 3GL tools are Java classes and JYMs (Waba, Waba Software) and RTAccess (Winward Group), which supports the linking and synchronization of Palm apps and databases. Forms-based toolsets, which are perhaps more suitable for general corporate development, are provided by Puma Technologies and Pendragon Software (Satellite Forms and Pendragon Forms, respectively).