Long road ahead for Internet appliances

Long road ahead for Internet appliances
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The infrastructure and compelling applications needed to make Internet appliances pervasive is still about three years away, according to three panelists speaking at DesignCon on Tuesday (Jan.30). But they debated the best path to IA ubiquity.

Larry Mittag, vice president and chief technologist at Stellcom Inc. (San Diego), Jerry Tu, director of communications technology at Handspring Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), and Jay Srivatsa, senior analyst in the Semiconductor Group at Gartner/Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.), had different suggestions on how to make the Internet appliance market soar. "Make it as simple as possible, but no more," Mittag cajoled an audience of designers. "Remember that you are designing for consumers, not engineers."

Mittag urged designers to give consumers what they want, not what the designers think they want.

Tu, on the other hand, asked listeners to "think along the lines of conventional products being applied unconventionally. "Most consumers don't know what they want, until they have it in front of them," he said. "Then they learn to apply their skills by using a new product."

To illustrate his point, Tu mentioned the ubiquitous keyboard attached to every desktop and mobile computer, and the graffiti language that has become the lingua franca for pen-based handheld computers. "Both input interfaces were forced on the user as the most efficient respective way to input content. By themselves typing out on 103 keys is not the most efficacious way to take advantage of computers, and applying graffiti strokes to write words on handhelds is also not the most elegant way to communicate with Palm-type devices. However, both were deemed to be the most practical interface method."

To that end, Tu said Handspring is making a concerted effort to provide handheld systems that offer "what the customer needs, not what he/she necessarily wants."

Handspring, whose handhelds compete with Palm systems but use the Palm OS, is concentrating on doing a few important things well, Tu said. It is extending its handhelds into enhanced data/voice applications and is attempting to turn them into instant-access, persistently-connected communications devices that sport a compelling graphical client browser and provide effortless messaging.

Taking a middle-of-the-road approach, Srivatsa said that many entities, including the IA manufacturer, the local telephone exchange, the GPS locality provider, local merchants, and the local government, would all benefit from mobile commerce transactions, which could be executed by giving hands-free voice commands to a mobile phone while driving down a highway, he said. "Find a way to execute on that and you provide a win-win situation for a lot of people in the value chain," he said.

Srivatsa painted a picture where IAs will be as ubiquitous by 2004 as PCs are today. "Worldwide, the majority of Internet access in 2000 came from PCs. By 2004, Internet users will be mostly IA owners," he said. Just as the PC altered the computer industry landscape and Yahoo transformed the Internet industry, so will IAs change the information technology industry and the IT infrastructure that will enable e-commerce and mobile-commerce transactions, Srivatsa said.

Srivatsa said IAs will also enable t-commerce transactions, which he described as ordering a favorite team's T-shirt over the Web while watching a championship game on TV. Many IAs will also be used to provide interactive information and enhanced e-commerce, he said.

"You can't discount the bad experiences of WebTV, which pioneered the Web/television synergy," Srivatsa said. "They were just there before its time, and their technology mismatch between presenting video and text on the same screen turned many people off." However, Srivatsa said that finding the right user-friendly presentation modes in Web/television sets will help make these devices very popular IAs.

Mittag said that the market hasn't yet seen many devices that provide both mobile and stationary access to the Internet. "Remember that the Internet was designed to accommodate any computer architecture," he said. "TCP/IP is just so resilient that the key part of any IA will be the communications of all types of data. IAs will be ubiquitous and transparent; most IAs will speak behind our backs," said Mittag, referring to IP-addressable household IAs such as refrigerators, microwaves and toasters.

Dataquest's Srivatsa said he doesn't forecast a true home network till 2004. Handspring's Tu said that the large bandwidth requirements touted by 3G wireless proponents will not be necessary for most Internet appliance uses.