A PDA WITHOUT COMMUNICATIONS? WHY BOTHER?

Rob Mechaley is the vice president of technology development for McCaw Cellular of Kirkland, WA, the leading provider of wireless communications services in the U.S. AT&T has recently purchased a multi-billion interest in McCaw.

Personal digital assistants, picocomputers, palmtops — the mobile computer industry is running hard, fast and late to create a new consumer market for its hardware and software. Yet the first generation of these machines seems to be little more than electronic Day Timers. What will compel anyone, except hardcore gadget junkies, to pay $1,000 for an electronic replacement for a much less expensive paper system?

While the notion of a pocket-resident static repository of data that can be sliced and diced to the limits of absurdity may be appealing to the techno-elite inventing these gadgets, the appeal for end users lies in practicality. There are much stronger and more relevant signs of where the market for “personal assistance” is really heading.

A NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

I ask that end users and the industry widen their scope of applications for mobile computing and step up to a communications technology that will enhance our business and personal lifestyles, as well as cut the ties that bind us: cellular for wireless data transmission.

Let’s think about where all that “stuff” in our paper Day Timers comes from. Except for a woman I know who uses her organizer mostly to accumulate highly artistic doodles she makes during the course of boring meetings, most of the scribbles in our paper personal assistants are driven by our communications needs —our need to network.

We have calls to make, messages to send, places to be and people to meet. The addresses and numbers needed to communicate are recorded in those little books. Watch people at the phones in airports sometime. Propped up, balanced on knees and consuming the little private space available, the paper-bound personal assistants are virtually non-volatile (except in case of fire) and are a totally portable locus of our personal networks.

The battery eaters. How does a battery-eating, somewhat more volatile electronic version do anything better than its cheaper, more familiar paper analog? We must stretch our concept of portable communications beyond this limiting, isolated function. In addition, many folks who use paper personal assistants also have cellular phones. Many of the 10 million cellular users in the U.S. might have already defined a market that a true electronic personal assistant can serve — something that allows the personal assistant to transcend its role as a static repository and become the active center of all this personal networking.

What’s more, it is estimated that more than 33 million mobile workers across the United States are primed and ready to utilize a technology that is versatile and capable of meeting a gamut of business functions. Although many companies have this market for electronic personal assistants defined as part of their long-term vision, many seem to feel they can make the market happen and meet the various needs of these mobile workers without the communications component. They are wrong, dangerously wrong! The fate of electronic personal assistants won’t be determined by the companies developing and producing these devices. It will be decided by the availability of wide-area wireless connectivity in the mobile computing devices.

COMMUNICATION WITHOUT RESTRICTION

Why wireless communications? Who wants to confine and restrict the abilities and concepts of mobile computing? Wireless connectivity presents the freedom and accessibility that will make mobile computing truly mobile.

Now some visions of mobile computing include communications by modems connected to the public telephone network. There are at least two problems with this idea. First, this communications method relies on the availability of an analog phone jack. Except in residences, the analog phone jack is a nearly extinct species, banished long ago by the now-pervasive digital PBX.

Second, this tethered, time-insensitive idea is totally at odds with the unrestrained, time-critical needs that a personal electronic assistant must fill. More than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada know the power of having a powerful networking tool with them in their daily activities. These 10 million communicators have discovered the power of ubiquitous, unbounded wireless communications through the huge cellular communications network.

A volume market. These people know the power, control and freedom this anywhere, anytime access brings to their lives. They represent a ready-made, multimillion-unit-volume market for an electronic digital assistant that can enhance the power of their personal network. Repositories won’t cut it with this crowd; they’ve already organized, and they want action.

A sizable proportion of these people also use pagers. Some cellular organizations report that two out of three cellular service sales include a pager. Why? A pager enhances the individual’s personal networking abilities by adding nonvoice, context-sensitive data communications.

PULL TOGETHER AND BUILD IT RIGHT

So why not pull this all together and build the killer product? Why not create personal electronic assistants that can mediate voice and data communications anytime, anywhere and in context, with the added capability to do a whole circus-load of information organizing tricks? All the necessary components are moving to the right place in time.

The challenge of those at the nexus of the computer and communications industries is to combine and converge efforts in order to build that all-encompassing product. Enter the nine biggest players in cellular. The ones who give those empowered 10 million people the ability to communicate when and where they want have been working during the past 10 months to extend the capability of the cellular infrastructure to include robust, efficient and high-speed packet data capabilities.

The enabling technology, Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) applies the same cost-reduced componentry utilized to build the 14 million cellular phones sold to date. Therefore, inexpensive capabilities can be built into any electronic personal assistant. Perhaps more importantly, CDPD has been designed from the ground up to integrate transparently with any extant or future data protocol; to ensure secure communications through advanced encryption and authentication techniques; to provide both voice packet data and circuit switched data capability in the same hardware, to allow seamless anywhere, anytime access across systems and service providers; and to allow weeks of use on standard batteries.

Best of all, and unlike alternative wide-area wireless data (only) alternatives, the CDPD system specification is completely open. All functions and their interfaces are completely described so that anyone can build any compatible system component. This is the firmament upon which the wireless communications industry and the computer industry can together build a significant new market, which gives people meaningful, substantial, easy-to-use ways to enhance their lives and livelihoods through devices and capabilities that deliver truly personal “assistance.”

CDPD technology will launch the era of “mass personalization,” or the ability for individually-constructed and tailored services to be offered to millions of users. In conjunction with cellular voice, CDPD is the communications keystone that enables this new opportunity.

Rob Mechaley