A Portable Office That Fits In Your Palm

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

It's 5:30 p.m., and you're about to leave for home (and planning to fetch your daughter from her violin class on the way) when you get called into a meeting with, say, the President. Sitting in the Oval Office with something that looks like an electronic notepad on steroids cradled in your palm, you discreetly dash off a message: "Running late. Be patient." With the tap of a pencil-like stylus, your note is beamed through the ether to the other side of town, where it lodges in a similar device, stowed in your daughter's book bag, and sets off a little beep. She hauls out her notepad, reads your message on the screen, scrawls across the bottom, "Cool. I'll hang out," and beams it back to your screen. It's now 5:32. You breathe a little easier and start to listen to what the man behind the desk has to say.

Sound like magic? It might, if you have never seen a laptop or pen-based computer, received an electronic-mail message, sent a fax or carried a cellular phone. But as any well-equipped information worker can testify, these devices have been getting smaller, cheaper and more ubiquitous. Why couldn't they all be squeezed into a single, all-purpose package -- a kind of pocket- size portable office -- that would let brokers buy and sell from a restaurant table, lawyers check precedents from a courtroom, doctors check lab results from a golf course, and salesmen close deals from a trout stream? Given the rapid advances in semiconductors, cellular communications and battery-power management, this dream is almost within reach.

The vision will be reinforced in the coming weeks by a series of bulletins from Silicon Valley. EO Inc., which last fall unveiled the first pen-based computer with a built-in cellular phone, will begin shipping finished products sometime this spring. Apple Computer, which has been teasing the press with carefully measured leaks about a pocket-size bundle of wonders called Newton, will belatedly deliver the first models sometime before summer (having missed | a self-imposed deadline last month). And this week a company called General Magic, which has been surrounded with breathless secrecy since it was founded three years ago by ex-Apple employees -- including two of the brightest lights on the Macintosh design team, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson -- will finally reveal what it has up its sleeve.

But anyone who hopes that one of these devices will let them do business from a beach in the Bahamas is bound to be disappointed -- at least in the immediate future. "It's like talking to your teenager about sex," says Jerry Michalski, an editor at Release 1.0, an industry newsletter. "You end up saying it's a wonderful thing that you're really going to love, but don't try it yet, because you can't."

Just how far the portable-office concept has to go was demonstrated inadvertently last summer by one of its biggest boosters. Richard Shaffer, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who publishes a closely read report called the ComputerLetter, set out to prove that mobile computing was already a reality by trekking into the Colorado Rockies with everything he would need to run his New York City office by remote control. By the time he had loaded his knapsack with a laptop computer, a cellular phone, a cellular data adapter, a couple of radio pagers, some software and all the batteries he could carry, he had a bundle that weighed more than 10 lbs. -- or as he puts it, "roughly the same as a small tent, a sleeping bag, a stove and an extra pair of boots."

Shaffer's knapsack office worked, but only after a series of setbacks that would have sent a less committed digital nomad back to smoke signals. Having replaced a faulty phone and a broken adapter and persuaded the local phone company to install the right kind of lines at his base camp, he shouldered his pack and headed for a suitably high ridge on the continental divide. At 12,500 ft. he broke out his portable computer, plugged it into his cellular phone and began sending faxes and electronic mail. Ten minutes later, his batteries died. "From our experience with cellular data transmission," a chastened Shaffer told his subscribers, "the technology is clearly not ready for everyday use."

That will begin to change over the coming months. A technology developed by IBM that enables packets of computer data to flow efficiently over the existing cellular-phone network is scheduled to become available this summer. Adapters for hooking computers into that network, which are now the size of a paperback, will soon be shrunk into a piece of plastic not much bigger than a credit card. And the generation of hand-held computers that can take advantage of these advances will soon undergo a population explosion.

Progress has already been made since Shaffer's ill-fated experiment. The machine EO introduced last fall packs most of what he needed into a 4-lb. box that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch pad with ears (where the speaker and microphone are) and a phone. Built-in software called PenPoint makes it fairly simple to look up phone numbers, scribble notes and messages with a stubby electronic stylus, and send them off as E-mail or faxes. (Faxes received on these devices appear on the screen rather than on paper.)

Apple's Newton, which works well enough to give an impressive demo, adds sound effects and a bit of whimsy to the technology mix. When you search for a date in a datebook, a tiny speaker emits the sound of a drawer opening. If you flip through a list of names and phone numbers, you hear the sound of paper rustling. If you tap the delete icon to get rid of some data, the screen shows the information crumpling like a wadded-up piece of paper, which then floats to the bottom of the screen and disappears. A cellular phone will not be included in the first models released, although there will be an infrared transmitter that Newton owners will use, according to the company, to "point and squirt" their business cards at each other when they meet on the street.

General Magic is taking a different route. Although it has designed a prototype device and the software needed to operate it, the company will let others build the box. Instead, it has concentrated on solving a more pressing problem: how to make electronic messaging as pervasive and easy to use as telephoning. To make a phone call, even a long-distance one, you just look up the number, pick up the phone and dial. To send a piece of E-mail across the country, by contrast, you have to know not only the recipient's number (or E- mail "address") but also what system he subscribes to (MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, CompuServe, Prodigy, Internet, etc.). To receive a message, you have to hook your computer to a modem, start a communications program, dial into the remote computer where your mail is stored and download the message into your computer.

General Magic's solution is an "intelligent" messaging system called Telescript, which has won the backing of an impressive list of computer and ( communications companies. In Telescript, electronic messages contain little computer programs that can guide the words, sounds or pictures through the thicket of interlocking computer networks. You just slap a name or address on a message and fire it off. Either it goes all the way to the recipient's personal computer (not merely to, say, MCI Mail's computer) or you are alerted that something has gone wrong.

Moreover, once a Telescript message gets where it was sent, it can actually do things. Incoming Telescript messages might be programmed to display information about who mailed them, what they are about and how long they are, helping busy executives decide which ones to read and which to toss. An outgoing message might be programmed to alert the sender if after two days it still has not been read.

The first Telescript machines will start to arrive next year. If the technology catches on, the lines between home and office, already badly blurred, could begin to disappear. How will employees feel when their boss, tracking them down to some beachside resort, starts issuing orders and leaving angry messages on their computer? "Telescript is like an incredibly powerful computer virus," says Denise Caruso, editor of a newsletter called Digital Media. "I don't know how many people understand the seriousness of what you might be able to do."

The saving grace of the new technology is that the computer intelligence used to find you in the trout stream can also be used to filter out unwanted messages. Users can instruct their computer to give top priority to urgent messages from family members and to reroute all calls from a particularly obnoxious sales representative. "The idea is to create a permeable wall between work and your private life, between the inside and outside world," says Release 1.0's Michalski. And if that fails, you can always forget to recharge the batteries.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco