.KEYWORD techskeptic1299
.FLYINGHEAD TECHNOLOGY SKEPTIC
.TITLE I believe!
.DEPT
.AUTHOR Kevin Quin
.SUMMARY This article was beamed to the North Pole from the Palm device of PalmPower’s Technology Skeptic Kevin Quin. Unknown to him, however, it was also intercepted by an astute PalmPower reader in Washington, D.C., who forwarded it to PalmPower. What? You’re surprised the North Pole has a receiver powerful enough to pick up an infrared beam from 3,000 miles away? Remember, Santa makes ALL the toys!
.EDNOTE The following message was beamed to the North Pole from the PalmPilot of PalmPower’s Technology Skeptic Kevin Quin. Unknown to him, however, it was also intercepted by an astute PalmPower reader in Washington, D.C., who forwarded it to PalmPower. What? You’re surprised the North Pole has a receiver powerful enough to pick up an infrared beam from 3,000 miles away? Remember, Santa makes ALL the toys!
.H1 Dear Santa
I could be selfish and ask for more toys but it’s the dawn of the new millennium, Santa, and I’m thinking about my fellow man. Please bring peace on earth, goodwill to men, and a silver bullet fix to the Y2K problem. After that, here are the things I’d like you to bring to our friends at Palm Computing to help them give the gift of organization to the world.
.H1 A new Memo Pad
Lots of Palm device users would like to use their Memo Pads to store and edit long documents (like this letter) but it can only handle memos of 4,000 characters or less. Anything longer gets broken up into multiple memos when it’s downloaded into the Palm device. Editing these memos, uploading them back to the PC, and merging them back into a single document gets impossibly cumbersome. Oh, I’m sure there’s a very good reason for the 4k limit, Santa, just like there was a very good reason that before Windows 95, file names could only be eight characters long and that reason was…well, I forget.
Anyway, although there are some third party software applications that allow editing of long documents, they are, at best, a lot less user friendly than the Memo Pad. Please bring Palm a new one.
And while you’re at it, you could make the process of downloading a file into a Palm device a lot easier. Right now, the system starts asking me about things like "comma separated value" files. Huh? I’m just a regular guy, Santa. Why can’t I just click the mouse button on the file I want to download?
.H1 A name
Santa, the name change thing isn’t working. I could call it a Pilot, but both Palm Computing and Pilot Pen Corporation would hate me for that. I could call it a PalmPilot, but that’s passe. But if I ask someone, "Do you have a Palm?" I’m going to get that special look my four-year old reserves for Daddy when he’s being VERY SILLY. Of course they have a Palm, Santa! Two of them! "Palm OS family of devices" sounds more like a communicable skin disease than a brand of electronic organizers.
.H1 A real security application
Santa, you know that to say I’m not a "technology person" is a bit like saying that coal mines are dark. But even I can hack into the "private" files on someone else’s Palm device. Wanna know how? All I have to do is load one of your Palm data files — like address.dat — into my word processor, and I can read all the information there, including the private records. I’d like to store all my info in my device, even passwords and credit card numbers, but right now that’s just too risky. Fixing the security application would solve that.
.H1 A new price tag
If Color Game Boys sell for under $100, why can’t a Palm device? How much can it cost to make this thing? Fifty bucks? Twenty-five? Less? There’s a huge market of soccer moms that would suck these things up in response to a real price drop. I know — I’m a soccer dad. Remind Palm Computing that McDonald’s makes more money by serving billions of burgers to us regular folks than a fancy Wall Street restaurant makes by serving a few patties of "steak tartare" to rich stockbrokers.
.H1 A new ad campaign
Palm has to can the ads with the naked woman. It’s not just that they’re sexist. If sexist advertising were really out of bounds, Santa, you’d have to stop making those beer commercials with the bikini-clad elves. (Does Mrs. Claus know about those?) The real problem with the naked woman ad — and let’s not forget the one with the Harley — is that it’s embarrassingly cheesy and amateurish. These ads say that Palm organizers are just expensive toys for male executives going through mid-life crises. I really don’t want my friends to think of me when they see these.
.H1 Real handwriting recognition
Why do we use the QWERTY typewriter keyboard even though everyone agrees that other key layouts would allow us to type much faster? We do it because it’s a standard, because that’s how our parents learned, and how we learned, and how our children are learning. Our Palm-device-using children, and there are more of them every day, are also now learning to write in Palm’s Graffiti alphabet. Santa, I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where everything from postcards to newspapers is written in Graffiti. I like our alphabet as it is, and I can write in it a lot faster than Graffiti. Please save us. Bring Palm organizers a program that allows us to write in the alphabet that even non-geeks know.
.H1 A sketch pad
If I have an appointment at an office I’ve never visited, I’ll often sketch a map to help me get there. Do I do this on my PalmPilot? No, I have to slap a little sticky note onto my organizer’s screen. Could we please move into the digital age now?
.H1 A better screen
Sure, the screens on the new Palm devices are much improved over the ones on the old PalmPilots, but they’re still sad little black-on-gray things. As you know, Santa, I’ll be turning forty next year, and nothing will lead more quickly to a mid-life crisis than needing reading glasses. Please bring Palm a more readable screen before I reach that point.
Does that mean color? I like the idea, Santa, but every time I mention it, some of your elves (you know, the ones with the propellers on their pointy little hats) shriek "battery drain!" so loud it almost makes me stop believing in Christmas. But who says they know what’s under the tree this year?
Those elves are a lot smarter than regular folks like me, but I know one thing for sure: paper planners are an easy-to-read black-on-white, not a murky black-on-gray.
Also, maybe a new screen could be larger, using the Graffiti area as screen real estate and having the Graffiti block pop up only when a user is ready to enter text. But I know that folks who use Graffiti a lot might find that part of the screen getting abraded over time. I’ll leave it up to you, Santa. You know what’s best.
And please, Santa could you bring
