The mobile professional of today can choose to carry any of a wide variety of communications and productivity devices. Throughout this article, however, we make the basic assumption that carrying separate cell phone and PDA devices will remain a viable and important option for a large class of mobile users.
In this appendix we provide a general discussion of the device options available to the mobile end-user, and we provide justification for this assumption.
Today's mobile professional has at least three major communications and productivity requirements:
If we leave Mobile Messaging out of the equation for the moment, and focus on just the voice communications and PIM requirements, our mobile professional has two basic choices:
Until quite recently, the mobile professional would have been obliged to carry a physically separate cell phone and PDA, since neither of these could provide the essential functionality of the other. Now, however, there are a variety of integrated cell phone/PDA appliances available in the marketplace, which combine voice communications and PIM capabilities into a single integrated device.
This phone/PDA integration has been approached from both the phone side and the PDA side. From the phone side, a number of cell phone manufacturers have marketed integrated phone/PDA models, including the Ericsson R380s, Kyocera Smartphone and QCP 6035, Mitsubishi/Trium Mondo, Motorola Accompli 009 and Accompli A6188, Nokia 9000, Microsoft/Sagem WA3050, and Samsung SCH-i201. And from the PDA side, Handspring has recently marketed its VisorPhone device, a snap-on module that turns its Visor handheld PDA device into a cell phone.
The great advantage of the integrated cell phone/PDA is the obvious convenience to the user of having both of these functions provided by a single device. However, this convenience is offset by certain disadvantages.
The cell phone/PDA is in many ways an integration mismarriage. Note that from a user interface point of view, cell phones are primarily ear and mouth devices, while PDAs are primarily hand and eye devices. For this reason the user interface and form factor requirements of the cell phone and the PDA are fundamentally different, and frequently in conflict. Furthermore, the cell phone represents the culture and traditions of the telecommunications industry, while the PDA represents those of the data communications industry. For all these reasons, marrying these two devices together requires major engineering compromises and tradeoffs.
As a result of this, the integrated phone/PDA lacks the form-follows-function elegance of the best of the cell phones, or the best of the PDAs. Though some of the models listed above demonstrate considerable ingenuity of design, there is no integrated phone/PDA available today that can match the functional or aesthetic integrity of either a specialized cell phone, or a specialized PDA.
This, of course, is a manifestation of a general principle: the features and performance of a multi-purpose device can never match those of a specialized device, when judged in the specialist arena. The Swiss Army Knife has undoubtedly earned its place in the world, but there are many situations in which the user is better off with a toolbox full of specialist devices.
In addition to this general consideration, there are various other drawbacks to the use of an integrated cell phone/PDA. For example, a dead battery is a constant hazard for any cell phone user, because of the inherent high-power requirements of cell phone usage. In this eventuality the multi-device user can simply use a payphone or a client's phone, and look up the necessary numbers in his PDA address book. The integrated device user, on the other hand, has a much bigger problem, since he has now also lost his address book functionality.
A detailed comparison of integrated versus specialist cell phone/PDA functionality is outside the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and neither is superior to the other under all circumstances. Which of the the two options is most appropriate for a given user depends on the usage patterns and preferences of that particular user.
Users who place a premium on convenience of portability will be more inclined to carry an integrated device, while those who place a premium on device specialization will be more inclined to carry independent cell phone and PDA devices. The integrated device and multi-device options are both viable alternatives, and each has its place in the mobile device marketplace.
Let us now add Mobile Messaging back into the mix. In terms of device integration, the mobile professional has four major options:
All of these are viable options, and all are in use today. Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but in this article we will focus our attention on option 3 above, in which the user receives Mobile Messaging functionality via his PDA.
The great advantage of this is that, unlike the cell phone/PDA integration, this is a particularly smooth integration. The PDA is essentially a general-purpose data processing and user I/O device; and from this perspective e-mail is just another software application that fits perfectly into the PDA paradigm.
Certainly, integration of e-mail into a PDA is far more logical and practical than integration of e-mail into a cell phone, so for those users who choose to carry a cell phone and a PDA, option 3 above usually makes more sense than option 2.
Thus for the user who chooses to carry a PDA, there is little to be gained by also carrying a specialized wireless e-mail device - whatever advantage the specialist device can offer is likely to be more than offset by the portability convenience of having the e-mail functionality provided by the PDA.
Users who carry an integrated cell phone/PDA device will, of course, be most inclined to select option 4 above. But for those users who prefer to carry separate cell phone and PDA devices, we see that option 3 provides several major advantages, and for this reason is the preferred choice among mobile professionals.
However, Mobile Messaging via the PDA has one major disadvantage. The PDA must be wireless-enabled, and this requires an additional device: the add-on wireless modem. This is inconvenient for the user in two respects. First, the add-on modem more than doubles the weight and dimensions of the PDA, greatly diminishing its portability, and relegating it from shirt pocket to jacket pocket. Second, the user must now maintain battery charge for two separate devices, requiring the use of two charging cradles, etc.
Eventually the modem functionality may become absorbed into and an integral part of the PDA, but we believe that this development is still some time away. For the moment the PDA and the modem are two separate devices, and will remain so for the immediate future.
In this article we describe how Mobile Messaging capability can be provided to the user who carries separate cell phone and PDA devices, while eliminating the modem requirement altogether.
As we have seen, the mobile professional can equip himself with voice, PIM and messaging capabilities in a variety of ways, including various levels of integration. The WhiteBerry/Bluetooth scenario we describe in this article is one more of these.
We do not claim to be able to predict which of these various alternatives will be more or less successful in the mobile marketplace. But we believe that each alternative is a viable option, and each has its place. The particular device configuration a user selects will depend on the specific requirements and preferences of that user.
In particular, the WhiteBerry/Bluetooth solution is appropriate for those users who want the performance and features of best-in-class, specialized cell phone and PDA devices, and who wish to have Mobile Messaging capability provided via the PDA.