InformationWeek

May 17, 1999

TechView:
Clients Can Be Rich And Thin

By Sean Gallagher

hile the thin desktop client is arguably a lost cause (witness the bloat of Microsoft's Office 2000 suite, reviewed this week), there are some applications for which thin is in. But even some of the thinnest clients are getting a little thick around the middle.

A little bloat isn't necessarily a bad thing--particularly when it's in the right place. That's the case with some of the latest crop of Windows CE Professional devices, such as NEC's MobilePro 800 and the upcoming Palm VII from 3Com's Palm Computing--two very different reflections of advances in thin-client platforms.

The Palm VII's "bloat" is almost undetectable, since it's attached by an antenna. When 3Com ships the new Palm, it will include a built-in two-way radio system that connects to BellSouth's MobiTex network, and in turn to Palm's own data services--giving users access to data from the Web without requiring them to burn up battery power and transmission time browsing the Web.

Palm VII users will be able to access E-mail sent to a "palm.net" address and pull down data from the Web with applications specifically packaged for the Palm. Applications that have already been built range from financial news tickers to a Starbucks store locator. Developers can build these applications by processing the HTML pages required by the Web pages used to query each site and return data.

These pages have to meet a set of style guides for Palm applications, but they can use business logic from existing Web applications, making it relatively painless to deploy interactive data collection apps based on the Palm platform and eliminating the need to keep data stored locally. That should make the Palm VII as attractive for intranet applications as it is for commercial Internet apps. And it will probably only be a matter of time before some customers (and service providers) look for custom-built applications based on a private implementation of Palm's technology.

The MobilePro has a different, more obvious bloat. Unlike most of the last generation of Windows CE devices--which put the "wince" in WinCE--it has a touch-type keyboard, a VGA color display that comes close to normal display dimensions, a built-in 56-Kbps modem and PC Card slot, and "pocket" versions of Microsoft's Office applications. That includes almost all of Outlook's functionality, even POP and IMAP E-mail. It can also run Visual Basic applications.

That makes the MobilePro and devices like it well-suited for a completely different set of data collection applications, as well as just filling in for a full-blown PC on occasions--like those I frequently find myself in. I'd never use a Palm to write a column, but this column was pounded out on a MobilePro atop trade-show trash cans and other flat surfaces. That's my kind of data collection.