Pocket PC Best Product Awards and Small Keyboards

The first Pocket PC magazine Best Product Awards will honor the incredible creativity and usefulness of products developed for the Pocket PC. We will announce winners at the Pocket PC Summit in Santa Monica, October 12 (www.pocketpcsummit.com). If you can't make it there, check for the results at our Web site and in the next issue of this magazine.

Foremost, we want the results of the awards to be useful to you and to be fair to the developers. We have come up with a plan to meet these two objectives. First, our third party products editor, Nitin Gupta, created a number of product categories and nominated the best products within those categories.

Second, as we do in the creation of this magazine, we will consult with Pocket PC experts from around the world. We will ask authors, webmasters, and active newsgroup participants to refine Nitin's selections and to vote. Together with a small number of these experts, we will select the award winners. You can follow this activity on a special Web site created for this purpose at www.PocketPCAwards.com. We welcome your opinions at the site. If you feel you are qualified to judge some categories, please e-mail me right away with your interest and qualifications.

SMALL KEYBOARDS COMING SOON FOR POCKET PCs

I still miss a keyboard on my Pocket PC. Therefore I examined, with interest, clever keyboard solutions for the Palm and Handspring devices at the recent PC Expo. The keyboards I saw were around the size of a Pocket PC or smaller, cost $50-$100, and used some ingenious input methods. Keyboards connect to the Pocket PC using the serial port. All indications are that most of these keyboards will be available for the Pocket PC soon. However, the differences in serial ports among Pocket PCs are what will slow down product introduction.

The first device I saw was the Pocket Keyboard with GlidePoint technology, marketed by Fellowes and developed by the Cirque Corporation. Pocket Keyboard is a small, rectangular, touch-sensitive pad about the size of the Pocket PC's display. The keys are laid out in a tight "QWERTY" pattern for faster typing. For accuracy, it won't let you hit two keys at once. Fellowes also markets Type 'N Go, which attaches to the Palm's side and then folds over the Palm, turning it into a clamshell device. Fellowes also sells a number of other PDA accessories (www.fellowes.com).

Matias Corporation makes the HalfKeyboard (www.halfkeyboard.com). You type with your left hand as on a normal keyboard, except the spacebar acts like both a spacebar and a shift key. When you hold it down, you get the missing half of the keyboard. The claim is that touch typists learn how to use the system in only a few minutes.

The ThumbPad Keyboard from Targus (www.targus.com) has a clip on the keyboard for thumb typing. It attaches to the Palm at the bottom via the serial port and the combination behaves as one unit.

I saw two other input-related products at PC Expo. First, I enjoyed speaking with Leonid Kitainik, who was one of the original authors of Calligrapher/Transcriber. He now works for Pen & Internet, a division of Parascript. He demonstrated a beta version of RiteMail (www.ritemail.net), a mobile, multi-platform, digital-ink e-mail application. Using the product, I can hand write someone a note on my Pocket PC and e-mail it, eliminating the normal data entry headaches.

Finally, I bumped into Karl Robb, president of TrueTip (www.truetip.com). His company markets a finger stylus and is coming out with a patented pen cap stylus. I especially liked the pen cap stylus. It takes the place of the cap on the normal inexpensive ballpoint pens and has a stylus pointer at the end.