The Techie Dream: An All-Purpose Supergadget

DAN HOYER LOVES HIS electronic toys, but he can't help wondering if they make him look silly. On the right side of his belt he's got a pager and a cell phone; on the left side, a personal digital assistant that stores his appointments, contacts and e-mail. Add to that an ID card that opens office doors, a Timex Data Link watch and the NEC 4080 laptop computer that he takes on customer calls. Hoyer, a network engineer based in Green Bay, Wis., admits, ""I feel like I have Batman's utility belt on. All I need is a Batarang and a spool of Batcable, and I'll be all set.''

Hoyer is sounding a common complaint: do we really need all these gadgets? Techies dream of one supergadget that would seamlessly blend the functions of all these units and along the way spare a few rain forests from becoming fodder for user manuals. It's not such an outlandish idea: already a new generation of cellular phones is adopting some of the functions of handheld computers, while the handhelds are usurping functions that used to belong to pagers, electronic planners, calculators and laptops. But it remains to be seen whether these new hybrids will capture the fancy of today's gadgetheads, and what exactly the winning gadget of the next century will look like.

If cellular-phone makers Nokia and Qualcomm have anything to say about it, a wireless ""smartphone'' will swallow some of its silicon brethren. For two years the Finnish telecom Nokia has been selling its 9000 Communicator series of devices. The unit masquerades as a phone but, upon opening, reveals a personal organizer with keyboard that holds contacts and appointments and connects to the Internet. At 14 ounces, it's about twice as heavy as a regular cell phone and has been criticized as bulky and hard to use. Last month Qualcomm said it would do better with its 8.2-ounce pdQ Smartphone, due out early next year. The device looks like a cell phone, but the dial pad folds down: inside is the wildly popular PalmPilot, which the company licensed from maker 3Com. No doubt directing his comments to the likes of Dan Hoyer, Qualcomm president of consumer products Paul Jacobs says, ""Consumers can reduce the number of communication devices they carry to one.''

Not so fast, say companies like Motorola, which sells some of the appliances like pagers that could be phased out. ""We're not believers that everything is going to consolidate into one universal device,'' says Randy Battat, a senior VP at Motorola. ""What's important is that all these things work together.'' Battat says that all the different forms of communication fill specific needs. Pagers, though seemingly ripe for obsolescence, still do the best in places like subways where cellular coverage fails. The real breakthrough, Battat says, will come when all our devices automatically synchronize their information. In other words, change a phone number in your PalmPilot and the same number will be instantly updated via a wireless connection in your phone and PC.

Gerry Purdy, CEO of the research firm Mobile Insights and a prognosticator on all things wireless, agrees with that vision; he thinks that in the next century we actually will see more, not fewer, mobile devices. Purdy adds two ingredients to the mix: a pen-based electronic tablet that will replace the yellow legal pad for note-taking, and a large handheld computer that will run the Microsoft CE operating system and serve as our primary computing companion. Code-named Jupiter by Microsoft, the units will have a keyboard and a larger screen than PalmPilots (on which inputting information can be difficult) and will cost half as much as the smallest laptops. Synchronizing information between all the various gadgets, Purdy says, will keep us from going insane, and ""we'll wonder how we ever got along without them.''

As for Dan Hoyer, he's still rooting for the one integrated appliance that will let him unclip some of the devices from his belt. When and if that happens, says Hoyer, ""hopefully I'll start looking a little less like a computer geek.''