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The Third Place of Gadgets

Ray Oldenberg, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, used the term "third place" to denote a location beyond home and work (the first and second places in most peoples' lives) where people actually interacted with each other. Third places include coffee shops, public markets, nehighborhood centers, and so forth.

I've had only two tiers of computers in my life: the desktop computer and the laptop computer. The former is pretty much a beast for certain tasks, the latter...well, ok, they are still beasts, but at least they are easy to move around. Laptops primarily remove the bother of synchronizing one's work at the office and at home, and they are the freelancer's best friend when clients ask you to work onsite.

Now, however, I have a third tier of computer...a computer most conducive to third places, where desktops can't easily go and where laptops are simply too much of a pain. On buses, waiting for airplanes, walking back from an offsite meeting, that kind of thing. This computer, of course, is the palmtop computer. Appropriately, my first handheld computing experience is the epynonymous PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone.

Old and Busted

For five years I had the Mustang of cell phones: the Samsung SCH-8500. It was great; near-indestructable, small clamshell design, and even capable of doing some limited WAP-style web browsing and even could act as a low-speed wireless modem. It was simple, and for making calls, it was great.

Unfortunately, as the years went on, I could not manage keeping its list of phone numbers up to date. My best friend's home phone number went without updates for two whole years because entering and updating information in more than one place was too much for my addled left-side brain to deal with, especially trying to sync my computer's contact database with my address book with my phone.

The best solution I found was syncing my contacts with my iPod, but I was lucky to remember just one of those devices when I left the house in the morning, much less both.

I resolved that I'd keep that phone until I could find a phone that could sync with my database, ideally wirelessy. Because that's all I'd ever want. Yeah. Mmm-hmm.

The New Hotness

The Treo 650 is a classic example of a gadget with everything I never knew I needed: Bluetooth. SMS. Wireless Web access (unlimited for a small flat fee). 16,000 software titles that include instant messaging clients, games, and MP3 players. Still and video camera. QWERTY keyboard. 320x320 color screen. Email clients for POP. and IMAP...

And, well, I still don't need any of it, really. But this stupid chunk of plastic is changing my life.

I'm now never without access to Google (which even has a special landing site for PalmOS-based devices)...a sure-fire way to win almost any argument over trivia. More practically, I've been able to find driving directions while riding in the car (as a passenger - calm down, Mom). Our firewall went down at work, preventing our desktop machines from accessing the Internet...and I could use the email, browser and IM clients on my Treo to communicate in the interim. Heck, on those days I do forget my iPod, I can store as many songs on the Treo as I could on an iPod shuffle...but with an actual display and linear playback (you'll notice the iTunes music player skin on the Treo in the first screen shot in this article).

A Designer's View of the Treo

The Treo makes me want to go back to making teeny tiny little pixel sprites! 320 pixels square is a mighty small canvas, but the clarity required to design pixel-level icons and typography can be demanding and challenging. The GUI of the PalmOS is serviceable, but cries out for some sweet, tender design lovin'; it doesn't get in your face, but it sure isn't inspiring to look at, either.

As far as I can tell there are between six system fonts in the Treo (three language fonts, three symbol fonts), all nicely chosen/designed to render well for varying strengths of vision, and there are utilities for converting other fonts as well.

Blazer, the PalmOS browser, is amazingly capable as a Web browser. It has an optimized rendering mode to fit content within a 320-pixel-wide window, and a normal mode that (naturally) requires a lot of horizontal scrolling. But in horizontal mode, Blazer is impressively standards-compliant. There seems to be some issues with text indents, font interpretation and margins (see screen shot to the left), but overall quite tight in terms of object placement on screen. Once you get beyond complex any CSS-based layouts, most content is quite easy to read.

As a creature of digital comforts, though, tones, alarms, and overall appearance is hard to customize...and yes, the Treo is a computer, so that means that from time to time your phone will crash. That still takes some getting used to.

Eternal Access to the Wireless Mind

All in all, it's a bold experiment in mobile connectivity. The nerd cred for carrying around something the size and appearance of a Star Trek communicator only goes so far, but just setting the Treo near by my laptop and letting it sync wirelessly (using iSync and the all-important iSync Palm Conduit) to transfer my digital life to and fro is truly a joy.

So far. These digital love affairs never last.