Editorial: December 7, 1995
Last year I wrote an editorial about my Casio Boss personal digital assistant (PDA) (EDN, Sept 15, 1994, pg 31). I have been using a new PDA, the HP200LX, for about half a year now. When I wrote about the Casio, it was to analyze its features from a design viewpoint. In keeping with the Tech Toys theme of this issue, I’ll now do the same for the HP.
As the name implies, PDAs are extremely personal. They help you manage a deluge of information crucial to your professional and personal lives. Through daily use, you quickly learn each product’s strengths and weaknesses. After using the Casio Boss for about a year and then the HP200LX for six months, I’ve learned a lot about PDA design by contrasting the operations of the two products. The Casio’s processor, operating system, and expansion card slot are proprietary. The Boss isn’t very programmable—it functions the way its designers intended (for the most part), and you have to live with those design choices. You can’t add applications to the Boss unless they’re available on Casio’s proprietary card format. The Casio’s LCD is limited, and the PDA is just too slow for extensive text entry.
The HP200LX, on the other hand, is a DOS machine, so I felt familiar with many of its features right out of the box. The display is a CGA LCD—certainly not state of the art for laptops, but a big step up for a pocket organizer. My HP200LX has 2 Mbytes of battery-backed SRAM and its PC Card (formerly PCMCIA) slot normally contains a 5-Mbyte SanDisk flash-memory card. Occasionally, I plug an Epson 14.4-kbps fax/modem into this slot. From a hardware perspective, the HP200LX is a much bigger machine.
The difference in ease of use between these two machines is profound. I can now carry with me the electronic equivalent of all 3262 business cards I’ve collected in the HP200LX’s larger memory. Every name, phone number, and e-mail address in this database is just seconds away. This contact file consumes 600 kbytes, so the 256-kbyte Casio never had a prayer of storing it. Even the HP200LX really can’t store such a large number of cards in its built-in database format. But because it is a DOS machine, I can run my existing contact-manager program, Info Select, as a native application on the HP200LX.
Info Select requires the use of expanded memory to handle such a large data file, and I found a DOS expanded-memory manager for the HP200LX on Compuserve. The expanded-memory manager, called EMM200, was written by a Japanese enthusiast. That’s another example of the importance of DOS compatibility. Similarly, the SanDisk flash-memory card comes with Stacker, a DOS disk-compression program that effectively doubles the flash card’s capacity. I use standard DOS communications programs with the plug-in modem.
DOS compatibility also makes the PDA’s spreadsheet and checkbook very compatible with my notebook computer. The spreadsheet is Lotus 1-2-3, version 2.3. Note that it’s not Lotus-compatible, it is Lotus. Ditto the checkbook program, Pocket Quicken. It is Quicken.
The trade-offs for the HP200LX’s extra abilities make an interesting contrast in design between the two products. Designers of the Casio Boss selected long battery life, lower product cost, and display readability over operating speed and software compatibility. The HP200LX’s designers selected software compatibility, responsiveness, and memory capacity over battery life, cost, and display readability. Each product occupies a different microniche and appeals to different customers. I strongly feel that detailed, competitive product analysis is essential to your ability to design competitive products. Have you made similar analyses between your competitors’ product offerings and your own? If not, I suggest you do so before the end of this year. If you have, perhaps it’s time to take another look at the competition before 1996 arrives.