Traditionally, personal electronic products were single-purpose devices such as wireless voice telephones, portable game consoles, GPS receivers, blood glucose monitors, portable DVD players and MP3 players.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

The designers of these products thought long and hard about which display technology and which specific vendors and displays were best suited to their products and customers — and the ways in which the customers were most likely to use those products. Then, of course, they had to balance those considerations against cost. That’s a complicated set of decisions, and for several years Insight Media has helped customers through what we call "sourcing consults," although they are often much broader than recommending one or more appropriate displays.

But now that even half-smart mobile handsets have become computer platforms that run many third-party applications, the situation gets even more complicated. The handset maker can’t be held responsible for using a display (or other sub-system) that is less than ideal for an application he never imagined, and the application developer is stuck with whatever handset he’s designing for. We will get to the point where handset makers of various types will be able to anticipate a core set of applications their hardware will have to run, and they can then do trade-offs among them. That’s not easy, but at least we can perform a rational analysis of the situation.

For now, though, it’s pretty much up to the buyer — corporate or individual — to identify his critical applications and determine how well his handset will run them.

Let me give you a simple example.

Telenav recently sent me a copy of their GPS Navigator software, versions of which are available for over 500 different mobile phones, and work with many different carriers. With the software installed, your handset works much like a good stand-alone GPS device, with maps being downloaded courtesy of your wireless provider’s data plan.

My phone is a Palm Treo 700p, which does not contain a GPS chip, so Telenav also sent me a small GPS Bluetooth receiver that’s about the size of four cigarettes with the filters cut off. The little receiver syncs with Treo effortlessly.

In my 16-year-old Mazda Miata, with the top down on a brilliant July 4th, the Treo’s bright 320×320 display actually performed quite well. If I had had a dash or windshield mount for it (the kinds of accessories that come with a dedicated product, but which you have to think about with a multi-purpose platform), the display would have been fine. The problem with the Treo was its always-poor speakerphone, which turned Telenav’s spoken turn-by-turn directions into unintelligible squawks.

The Telenav application is extremely well done. To optimize the experience of using it on the 700p, I could buy a 2.1-channel PC speaker system and an inverter to power it. That would occupy the passenger seat in the Miata, but this is a work in progress. (And of course I could establish a Bluetooth connection to the car’s sound system.)

We’ve become used to accessorizing PCs to make them better platforms for the applications we run most, but that approach is limited when it comes to multi-function personal devices. For now, just thinking about the potential problems is useful.