Face It, Handhelds Are Evolving Into Regular Computers

I tend to break Palms and Pocket PCs into two categories: PDAs and handhelds.

Devices are separated into these categories by how they are intended to be used.

A PDA is a peripheral for a desktop or laptop computer. Without a bigger computer to synchronize with, it's virtually useless.

Back in the mid-90s, when the first Palm OS models debuted, they were definitely PDAs. A few still are released today, like the entry-level Zire models.

A handheld, in contrast, can stand alone (although they aren't used this way often enough). A handheld can do just about anything a desktop or laptop computer can do.

I classify just about all Palms and Pocket PCs released in the past few years as handhelds.

As these mobile devices have started to offer more of the functions of regular computers, they have taken on more of the features of regular computers.

This trend has made some huge leaps forward in the last 12 months.

This hasn't come without the resistance of many long-time PDA and handheld users. All I can say to these people is that there's no point in fighting it: it's inevitable that handhelds are going to become more and more like full-sized computers.

Hard Drives

I'll start out with the most controversial desktop-type feature to recently make the jump into handhelds: hard drives.

Several handhelds and smartphones -- most notably the LifeDrive offered by Palm, Inc. -- have included microdrives, giving them not just megabytes but gigabytes of storage.

The advantages of this are obvious. One of the main reasons some people carry a laptop around with them rather than a handheld is because the handheld can't hold all the files they need.

However, some have expressed concern about having a spinning hard drive in a portable device. And when I say these people have "expressed concern," I mean they said that "the Devil will get a job as a ski instructor on the snowy slopes of the Alternate Destination before any handheld of mine has a hard drive in it." Or words to that effect.

This really shouldn't surprise me. People have always objected whenever a new category of portable devices with internal hard drives hits the market, and always for the same reason: people are worried that the hard drive will be damaged during the normal bumps and jounces of everyday life.

I heard these objections for the first time back in the late 80s when laptops debuted. And the same predictions of doom were expressed when Apple introduced the iPod.

Let's face it, there are millions of spinning hard drives in portable devices all over the place, and the world hasn't come to an end.

Don't get me wrong, if I were given a choice between a microdrive and solid-state Flash memory of equal capacity, I'd choose the Flash memory... if it weren't for one thing.

Price.

Now and for the conceivable future, gigabyte per gigabyte, hard drives are cheaper than Flash memory.

It's all very well to say that you'll always prefer Flash memory to a spinning hard drive, but when you're standing in a store looking at two basically equivalent devices, and the device on the left costs $500 and the device on the right costs $400, your prejudice against microdrives will evaporate.

No editorial would be complete without a prediction or two. That's why I'm going to say that in just a few years, you'll be hard pressed to find a high-end handheld without a built-in microdrive.

This includes Pocket PCs. Leaked information from Dell indicates that an Axim with a built-in hard drive is coming this fall. And I'd be very surprised if HP wasn't far behind.

Using RAM as RAM

One of the most profound differences between most handhelds and regular computers is the way they store files and applications.

PCs use non-volatile ways to handle storage. In the vast majority of cases, this means a hard drive. RAM is used only for very short-term storage. Basically, only applications and files that are currently being used go into RAM.

That's why, if the power is suddenly cut off to your PC, all that is lost is the documents that you are working on at that moment.

On PDAs and handhelds, both long-term and short-term Storage is handled by RAM. A lot of these devices have no built-in non-volatile storage at all.

Power must be constantly supplied to RAM. If it stops, like when your handheld's battery runs dry, everything on it is lost, including all the applications and files you've added to it.

Because no one likes to have their precious data lost, recently there's been a strong trend towards having handhelds use the same sort of storage arrangement as regular computers.

Palm OS Probably the breakthrough device in this area is the Tungsten T5. It uses Flash ROM for long-term storage, and RAM only for holding currently data currently being used.

Since the debut of the T5, Palm has released several more devices with this same general arrangement, like the LifeDrive.

I know a lot of Palm users aren't fond of this new setup, but I think this is mostly because Palm's implementation has been a bit clumsy. At its launch, the T5 was quite buggy, and not enough actual RAM was included in the LifeDrive, slowing the device down.

I'm confident that Palm will eventually work the bugs out, and it will be clear to everyone that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Pocket PC Microsoft has also realized the advantages of this arrangement and is building it into Windows Mobile 5.0.

I know there are some Pocket PC users who are nervous about Microsoft's version of this, which it calls Persistent Storage. Most concerns seem to center around performance.

With Persistent Storage, long-term storage will be handled by Flash ROM, while current Pocket PCs use RAM for this job. RAM is inherently faster than Flash ROM, so people are afraid future devices will be unacceptably slow.

While the developers at Microsoft who came up with this system admit that Persistent Storage will be a bit slower than the current system, they have assured us that it won't be horribly slow.

Microsoft has had a lot of practice in this area, as its smartphones have used Persistent Storage since 2002.

...and More

As time goes by, other features that have until now been almost entirely confined to regular computers will migrate to handhelds.

One of these is USB ports. I've used the Asus A730 that has one of these, and I was highly impressed with how easy it was to hook a keyboard and mouse up to this device.

And there will be others. Handhelds have been in the process of evolving into tiny laptops almost since their inception, and this will continue for the conceivable future.

Those who are resisting this trend are trying to do the impossible, and should just give in to the inevitable.