MANAGING TECHNOLOGYedited by Mark Cain

● PDA: Paradigm-Disrupting Appliance?by Mark Cain

Every once in a while something comes along thatgets adopted at lightning speed and in the processchanges everything, or at least changes many things

in profound ways. When these conditions are met, we havewhat is called a disruptive technology. (This is my defini-tion, anyway. I’ll share another one with you in a minute.)Ancient examples include the wheel, the lever, and fulcrum.The pulley, a more recent device, probably qualifies as well.The automobile and other transportation technologies wereprime movers in changing us from an agrarian to an urbansociety. And let’s not forget the radio, the telephone, and thetelevision.

In the 1940s, ENIAC and other early electronic digitalcomputers were precursors of a disruptive technology, butthey themselves probably don’t count among this group.Why? Because they didn’t directly affect everyone’s livesand, perhaps more to the point, they weren’t pervasive. Afterall, not everyone could have a computer the size a grocerystore in the basement. But these early computational mon-sters were precursors of what was unarguably a disruptivetechnology: the personal computer.

There are other examples: the VCR (even though no oneknows how to program one); the CD; the CD-ROM; theDVD player, an astonishing device because of the speedwith which it penetrated the market.

Cell phones are yet another example. Recently, SalisburyState learned, shortly after investing nearly a million dollarsin a new telephone infrastructure, that 67% of their studentsuse cell phones. Soon cell phone penetration rates on collegecampuses will reach 100%, and institutions of higher educa-tion will have to find ways to live without the long-distancerevenue students used to generate in their rooms when theycalled home.1

Lest we forget, there’s the World Wide Web. In 1994, afriend of mine went to France to teach for a year. When hecame back, he told me he felt like Rip Van Winkle wakingup, for it was during that period that the World Wide Webtook off. Movies had Web sites, faculty had Web sites, dogshad Web sites.

And for good measure, here’s one more example of adisruptive technology: Web-based course management sys-tems. We brought WebCT to my institution in 1999; withintwo years 50%, yes, that’s half of the regular faculty, hadadopted it. And academe will never be the same.

Ease of use, ubiquity, the ability to change the way peo-ple work and play: all of these inventions had them. Thesetraits are hallmarks of disruptive technologies or, if you pre-

fer, killer applications. All of which is my leisurely way ofleading up to a particular disruptive technology: the personaldigital assistant, or PDA.

I got my first PDA back in 1994, an Apple Newton. Itwas the size of a brick. I’m sure you remember it as the buttof numerous jokes, being lampooned even in Doonesbury,primarily because of its inadequate handwriting recognitiontechnology. “Pick up a loaf of bread” could be interpretedby the Newton’s limited software as “Rich spy a long atfreak,” and, at least in my experience, no amount of trainingcould improve things much.

The Newton, in concept though, was brilliant, ahead of itstime, back in the stone ages of 1993 when the product firsthit the market.2 And it wasn’t long before someone solvedthe handwriting problem.3 An electrical engineer named JeffHawkins developed a recognition system called Graffiti; itused a simplified alphabet that was easy to learn and veryaccurate. I loaded it on my Newton, and my input problemwas solved. Using Graffiti wasn’t as fast as regular hand-writing, much less keying at a computer; I could never man-age more than about 20 words per minute. But it was accu-rate, and it liberated this user from a keyboard.

By the way, this same fellow who developed Graffiti wasthe inspiration behind the PalmPilot and all its descendents.When he got fed up with 3Com, which owned the Palm line,he moved on and started Handspring. We owe Hawkins alot, for he more than anyone else created this industry.Hawkins’ chief contributions were recognizing a couple ofimportant things and then rigorously adhering to these dis-coveries as he and his team designed their products.

HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS OF PDAS

Hawkins established the primary functions of the PDA whenhe had the following epiphany, early on in the developmentof the PalmPilot. “I realized my competition was paper, notcomputers.”4 He recognized that the PDA would be first andforemost an organizer, a stand-alone device used mostly fortracking appointments, contacts, to-dos, and so forth.

Hawkins had one essential design requirement for hisPalm devices; they had to stay small, fitting into a space nolarger than a shirt pocket (presumably sans pocket protector,though there is no guarantee of this, since Hawkins is anengineer). He stacked up triple-A batteries to check howthick they would make the final product. If Hawkinscouldn’t get the entire package into that pocket of his, thewhole thing would go back to the drawing board. That de-

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sign principle—small is best—proved critical to the successof the PDA industry.

There were other organizers around. The venerable Frank-lin Planner had for decades been offering similar functional-ity in a non-tech package. There were computer-like devicesthat did not use the Palm Operating System (Palm OS), suchas the Sharp Wizard line, devices that had keyboards. Spe-cial-use products came along, such as the Blackberry, a por-table e-mail device with an unusual keyboard operated withyour thumbs.

Yet none of them had the market penetration of Hawkins’original device. In fact, the Palm and its successors were thefastest-selling computer products of all time.5 Within 18months of their introduction in 1996, 1 million PalmPilotswere sold.6 In 1998, just in the U.S., consumers caught up inPDA-mania purchased almost 4 million units.7 An estimated9.4 million sold in 2001.8 Dataquest forecasts that “by theyear 2003, sales figures will finally exceed that of desktopcomputers and reach 20 million.”9

In 1997, Microsoft, seeing a business opportunity, gotinto the game with devices powered by the Windows CE(Compact Edition) operating system. CE units were bulkierthan Palms but also more powerful and more easily inte-grated with Microsoft Office applications. Some of these CEdevices grew to near laptop size; these PDAs-on-steroidswere called Handheld PC Pros. I still have one of these. (Infact, I’m sitting in Starbuck’s right now, writing this articleon one.) But they violated the size principle Hawkins so pre-sciently established, and they never really took off.

Palm devices still control up to 90% of the market, yetMicrosoft has had enough of an impact to provide a viablealternative. So now we have two de facto standards: PalmOS and Windows CE devices, the latter more commonlyknown as Pocket PCs.

Why are people so excited about these things? First,they’re portable. Laptops, even small ones, are at best lug-gable. Second, PDAs are instant on and instant off, veryhandy for quickly checking data. Notebook PCs on the otherhand typically take a minute to boot. Third is battery life. Alaptop is lucky to go for three hours, no matter what the ad-vertising hype says about longer computing times. A PDAcan compute all day without running out of juice.

But there are down sides to them as well. I promised youa second definition of disruptive technology, and here it is:A disruptive technology “results in worse product perfor-mance, at least in the near term. . .[It] brings to the market avery different value proposition than had been available pre-viously. . .Products that are based on disruptive technologiesare typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, moreconvenient to use. [But, they generally] underperform estab-lished products in mainstream markets.”10

PDA Web browsers aren’t as powerful as a full-blownversion. In the past, they couldn’t handle secure (https:) con-nections. They couldn’t process PERL scripts well, if at all.These limitations have been overcome, but the PDA Webbrowser will likely continue to be less robust than its coun-terparts for PC and Macintosh.

I’ve already said that personal digital assistants are small,which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The monitoris the size of the coaster you put your drink on; the inputpanel is as big as two postage stamps laid side-to-side. Thesmall screen can display only a very limited amount of data

at one time. Writing on the “postage stamps” with a stylus isslow and awkward.

How small can a PDA be? Well, if you count my TimexData Link watch, into which I daily beam two months of myappointments and about 50 phone numbers, pretty small.Yet, at some point, you hit limits. Not technical ones, humanones. “. . .the real end node in an information system is thehuman user him- or herself.”11 Our eyes can focus only sotightly, our fingers can only render letters of a certain mini-mal size. Our hands move only so swiftly, and the synapsesof our brain fire just so fast. Unless and until we change thePDA paradigm in some major ways, such as moving awayfrom hand- and toward voice-input and/or having ubiquitousmonitors that anyone can co-opt at any time (walls that turninto monitors?), PDAs are right now probably about as smallas they reasonably can be.

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: BEYOND THE “ORGANIZER”FUNCTION

The medical industry has been an early adopter of the PDA.Doctors and nurses comprise a mobile workforce, so theportability of the PDA, especially in a wireless environment,is attractive. Early applications in medicine have been logi-cal extensions of what PDAs are good at, that is, providingaccess to information that needs to be consulted frequently.This could include an electronic drug manual, patientrecords, and quick note-taking.12 The PDA may even helpreduce errors in prescriptions by providing pharmacists withlegible prescriptions.13 Some products developed specificallyfor the PDA in a medical setting include “Griffith’s5-Minute Clinical Consult; ePocrates, a drug database; ABGPro, a blood gas analyzer; [and] MedCalc, a medical calcula-tion program.”14

Most PDAs communicate only with their parent or hostcomputers, synchronizing calendars, contacts, and files. Butthis is changing and opening up new possibilities. Palm.Netis a nationwide wireless network; it’s a bit slow, but itworks, and you can check e-mail and the weather, “instantmessenger” someone, do a little Web cruising, and so forth.Bluetooth is finally coming along for use in PDA communi-cations. Some PDAs, such as the Compaq iPAQ line, canaccept a wireless network card, communicating using the 11Mbps (Megabits per second) IEEE 802.11b standard. Be-cause campuses all over the country are installing 802.11bwireless networks, this very quickly is going to become abig deal. If the campus has a voice over IP (VoIP) telephonenetwork that connects with the wireless network, the PDAwith a little software can become a wireless VoIP telephone.Here’s a real example of convergence that is just around thecorner.

So: PDAs are everywhere now, perhaps not as prevalentas cell phones, though they continue to penetrate the market.The prospect of supporting all the different versions of thesedevices is daunting. Fortunately, libraries don’t have toworry about installing PDA software on host PCs or net-working Palms or fixing Pocket PCs when they break. Thatwill be left to their colleagues over in IT. Yet libraries willhave to be mindful of what a wirelessly networked PDAcould mean to systems and services.

And PDAs have been working their way into higher edu-cation, first with heavily scheduled administrators and inter-

January 2003 45

ested faculty, and now with some student populations. AtEDUCAUSE 2002, I convened a session about the Univer-sity of Minnesota-Duluth College of Science and Engineer-ing’s new student PDA requirement. In addition to using thedevices for in-class note taking, students are taking multiple-choice tests and doing simulations and experiments. Instantpolling programs are also being used at some institutions.15

The University of South Dakota has one of the most ambi-tious PDA programs in the country. Students use them infield research, such as measuring acidity in river water andtraining musicians on pitch.16 The University of Arizonaalso makes heavy use of the devices.17 Some students there,and at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, have complainedabout lack of power and limited software available whencompared to what is available with a laptop,18 but these con-cerns are somewhat obviated by the lower price, ease of cre-ating software, portability, and long battery life.

The University of South Dakota has installed “sync” sta-tions, cradles in which devices can be placed for synchroniz-ing data or uploading and downloading files.19 We may allneed to be doing that soon. This is the easy stuff though. Itis in wireless networking and, most especially, in the rede-sign of information systems interfaces that the real chal-lenges will come. Higher education institutions in generaland academic libraries in particular are going to have to givea great deal of thought to what kinds of services they arewilling and able to provide to PDA users.

Libraries have been interested in the devices for sometime. As early as November 1993, the University of SouthAlabama library tried out the use of PDAs in a library.20 InJune 2001, LITA devoted an entire pre-conference to hand-held computers before the San Francisco ALA annual con-ference.21

Here are some examples of experimentation with PDAs inlibraries: Two librarians at Yale received a grant to see ifthey can create PDA interfaces “for such reference resourcesas MicroMedex and for several electronic textbooks.”22

Western Kentucky University developed a prototype Website for PDA viewing. (A demonstration site—viewable onlyon a PC or Mac at this point, not a PDA—is available atwww.wku.edu/Library/tip/pda/index.htm.)23 The Universityof North Carolina-Chapel Hill Health Sciences Library was“one of the first campus units to develop a PDA compatibleWeb page.”24

PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Imagine for a moment how a wirelessly networked PDAmight be used in a library. Staff members could be in thestacks conducting inventory, talking to the database in real-time, marking items not-on-the-shelf. They could be at thephotocopy machine, recording in-house use, also in realtime, as they place the abandoned tomes onto a book cart forreshelving. Researchers could identify items they want topull from or peruse in the stacks, avoiding the step of print-ing or transcribing the information from the screen of thelibrary’s hard-wired catalog workstation. As Clifton Fosterhas said, “It has always bewildered me why we spent thou-sands of dollars on a computerized catalog for the libraryand then required patrons to write down the book informa-tion on a scrap sheet of paper.”25 The library could conservea goodly amount of paper and toner, not to mention the wear

and tear on printers. With PDAs, the catalog is in the re-searchers’ hands; they carry it with them right to the shelf.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But there are hurdles to over-come. Installing a wireless network is the least of it; accesspoints go up easily, and with some careful engineering andthe proper antennae, coverage—even in the stacks—can beexcellent. More problems will come with the client devices,getting them to talk to the network, for example. And theclients themselves—the users—will need training. Much ofthis, as was mentioned above, could be handled by campusIT, but in larger institutions library systems offices may beheavily involved.

The greatest challenge, though, will relate to the limita-tions of the PDAs display. Libraries have built most of theirservices around the World Wide Web, often with a resolu-tion as low as 640 � 480 pixels, with 256 colors. Of course,computer monitors these days can handle much greater reso-lution: 800 � 600, 1600 � 600, 1024 � 768, 1280 � 1024pixels, and 16 bit (high) color or 24 bit (true) color, butmost graphic Web designers plan for the lowest commondenominator, then test the display on PC and Mac and ondifferent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape.

With PDAs so prevalent, what is “lowest common de-nominator” going to mean in a year or two? A pixel densityof 640 � 480 might display a third of an 8.5 � 11 inchpage on a traditional PC monitor; that already means somescrolling is likely. But with a screen just a few inches indiagonal, how much scrolling will be necessary to find theneeded information at the bottom of the page? And it’s notjust up-down scrolling; right and left movement will be nec-essary as well. “As a product designer, it pays to make lowuse of images on the Palm output.”26 The same could besaid for the Pocket PC. A single image would take up theentire screen. Even without an image, only a few lines oftext may be displayed at a time. Pretty library interfaces willbe a waste of valuable real estate on a Palm, Handspring, orPocket PC.

Some of the commercial library vendors are already mak-ing plans for PDA access to their products. Innovative Inter-faces, for example, has developed a public catalog and circu-lation system interface for wireless PDAs, one that isdesigned for a small screen, one that minimizes scrolling.Two students at Western Michigan University have designedone for the Endeavor Voyager OPAC.27

But what library only serves up Web pages from its on-line public access catalog? At minimum, library staff mem-bers have created and maintain dozens of local pages. Therewill soon no longer be a “one size fits all” Web interface forlibrary services, and all of these Web pages will need to beredesigned for a PDA’s tiny display.

This is not to imply that libraries will return to stark Websites. Instead, there will be more than one version: a PC/Macinterface and a separate one for the PDA, for example. Thismay eventually be done with technology, that is, the Webserver somehow senses the device requesting information ofit, and builds the correctly sized page on the fly. In manyinstances, though, libraries and their vendors will probablyhave to develop the two different interfaces by hand andgive users the option to choose between them. Fortunatelythere are some tools to help. For example, a company by thename of AvantGo (www.avantgo.com) specializes in extend-ing PDA Web functionality.

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Until now, I have talked about reformatting Web pages,which are basically comprised of electronic text, images, andlinks. In recent years, though, libraries have relied on fileformats that are essentially images. Many database services,many electronic reserve systems, make heavy use of portabledocument format (pdf) files for rendering an exact image ofa periodical article, typically an image that is 8.5 � 11inches in size. There are pdf viewers for both Pocket PC andPalm, but again the small monitor size is going to pose chal-lenges. Will users simply have to do a lot of scrolling, orwill it be possible to somehow break up the image in a waythat makes the document easier to manage on a PDA? If thelatter, will there be automated ways to do it, or will it haveto be done by hand? This could be a major challenge forlibraries in the aggregate; there is a huge national inventoryof intellectual content stored in portable document format.We could have a problem costing millions to solve.

Some electronic books are stored in portable documentformat; others have proprietary file structures. Here, though,we may get a break. Users are pretty intolerant of readinglarge amounts of text on even the best, high-resolution com-puter screen. I actually know a few people who will readbooks on their PDAs, but there are probably only about 15of these folks in the known universe. So, while we may ad-dress and even overcome the challenges of reformattingelectronic books so that viewing them on a PDA will betolerable, if not pleasant, there may not be much of a de-mand.

But then again, there might.One other potential challenge must be mentioned at this

point, and it is a legal rather than technical one: “the intel-lectual property rights of the data provider.”28 I rememberwhen OCLC copyrighted its database back in the early1980s. While libraries owned the content they had input, thedisplay, presentation, and organization of the data were“owned” by OCLC. The same issue could surface again ifwe try on our own to reformat data from a proprietary data-base for display on a PDA.

Libraries are providing a wider variety of informationformats than ever before, and these include media. PDAs donot have CD-ROM drives, but they do have multimedia ca-pabilities. Playing sound clips should pose few problems.Video is possible also; Virginia Commonwealth Universityis already creating short video modules for Pocket PCs.29 Asdigital video libraries become accessible over networks andthe Internet, there will be some users who wish to viewthem on their PDAs. This is actually more likely than read-ing, say, Moby Dick, on your Handspring.

THE PDA: A FAD OR HERE TO STAY?Is it true that personal digital assistants have moved from“glorified day planners into universal-access devices, able toferret out essential information wherever it happens to bestored—on the desktop PC, the home-office server or theInternet?”30 Perhaps. The portability and ubiquity of thesedevices, especially when they are networked, take anytime/anyplace computing—and researching—to new levels. DonMcLaughlin at West Virginia University says: “Over thenext couple of years, we should see a convergence of thePDA, wireless networking, and a broad array of useful PDAsoftware. With this convergence the PDA will likely becomea general-purpose information appliance, smaller and more

portable but otherwise filling the same function as the PC. Itwill probably become an indispensable tool for students, fac-ulty, and administrators in higher education.”31 This conver-gence is beginning already, with cell phone capability tossedin for extra measure.

There is yet another new device on the horizon. The Tab-let PC should just have been released around the same timeas this article. I got a sneak preview of one of these devicesin late October: pretty neat. The one I saw was three poundsand change; the screen was laptop size, and you could writeon it with a stylus. It also had a full-size keyboard. But bat-tery life is still in the laptop range, about three hours. Bootup time: one minute. It’s basically a notebook PC that hassome PDA-like characteristics, meaning it has some of theadvantages, and some of the disadvantages, of each platform.Yet it will never have the portability of a personal digitalassistant.

Is the PDA, as currently conceived, a permanent featureon the information landscape or only a passing fad? WillDilbert’s fingernail keyboard and a pair of glasses that sub-stitutes for a monitor replace it? I don’t know. But that’s notreally the point.

I think the main messages here are three: (1) New com-puter and communication devices are being invented everyday. (2) We cannot build information systems assuming thatonly a single type of device, the IBM PC-compatible desk-top, for example, will access them. (3) We must constantlybe reinventing libraries and their systems. In the future, thevery near future, people are going to be viewing library sitesfrom a variety of devices, and the research resources infor-mation professionals provide will need to be agile enough toeither adapt themselves or be adapted with minimal effort.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Andrea L. Foster, “10 Ways Colleges Can Cut IT Costs: 4, StopInvesting in Phone Systems Students Won’t Use,” The Chronicleof Higher Education XLIX (October 2002): A40.

2. Jean P. Shipman & Andrew C. Morton, “The New Black Bag:PDAs, Health Care and Library Services,” Reference ServicesReview 29 (2001): 229.

3. Paul E. Teague, “Father of an Industry,” Design News 55 (March2000): 111.

4. Ibid., p. 110.5. Ibid.6. Christian Sebastian Loh, “Learning Tools for Knowledge No-

mads: Using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in Web-BasedLearning Environments,” Educational Technology 41 (Novem-ber-December 2001): 5.

7. Ibid.8. Shipman, op. cit.9. M, Frauenfelder, quoted in Loh, op. cit.

10. Clayton Christiansen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When NewTechnologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston, MA: HarvardBusiness School Press), p. XV.

11. Don McLaughlin, “Information Technology User Devices inHigher Education,” New Directions in Higher Education (Fall2001): 35–36.

12. Shipman, op. cit., p. 230.13. Ibid., p. 231.14. Carol Galganski, Tom Peters, & Lori Bell, “Exploring Planet

PDA: The Librarian as Astronaut, Innovator, and Expert,” Com-puters in Libraries 22 (October 2002): 34.

15. Scott Carlson, “Are Personal Digital Assistants the Next Must-Have Tool?” The Chronicle of Higher Education XLIX (October2002): A36.

January 2003 47

16. Ibid., p. A34.17. Shipman, op. cit., p. 235.18. Carlson, op. cit., p. A36.19. Ibid., p. A34.20. Clifton Dale Foster, “PDAs and the Library Without a Roof,”

Journal of Computing in Higher Education 7 (Fall 1995): 86.21. Michael Binder, “Inside Pandora’s Box—The Development of

the First PDA Library Portal for Academic Libraries,” Against theGrain 14 (June 2002): 65.

22. Shipman, op. cit., pp. 235–236.23. Binder, op. cit., p. 66.

24. Margaret E. Moore, Julia Shaw-Kokot, & Julie A. Garrison,“Informatics Education: Mobile Technology Forums,” MedicalReference Services Quarterly 21 (Summer 2002): 77.

25. Foster, op. cit., p. 88.26. Ken Varnum, “Porting Library Services to the PDA: Information

@ Your Fingertips,” Online (September/October 2000): 16.27. Binder, op. cit., p. 67.28. Varnum, op. cit., p. 17.29. Shipman, op. cit., p. 233.30. M Frauenfelder, quoted in Loh, op. cit., p. 7.31. McLaughlin, op. cit., p. 33.

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