May 17, 1999
Technology

A pig in a palm

From the barn to Bay Street, tiny computers are red hot

BY WARREN CARAGATA

John Kleinsasser is not the usual early adopter of high-tech gadgets. Kleinsasser is a pig farmer from Jenner, a small Alberta town about 110 km northeast of Medicine Hat. A Hutterite, he does not own a television or even a radio because his religion forbids the use of technology to entertain. But each day finds him in the pig barn, equipped with a Palm III, a small handheld computer that is increasingly cropping up in the most unlikely places, from hospital wards to restaurants to pig barns. Kleinsasser uses the device to keep track of the 270 breeding sows and 16 boars that the Hutterite colony keeps, and he loves it. The little computer saves him about half an hour a day and allows him to do most everything a pig farmer must do, from keeping track of vaccination schedules to figuring out when each sow is ready to breed. "I've been waiting for years for something like there is on the Palm," he says.

Kleinsasser's enthusiasm is far from unique. After years of false starts with so-called digital assistants -- such as Apple's Newton -- that won notice for good ideas and terrible execution, the Palm series from California-based 3Com Corp. has single-handedly created a market for the small, powerful and simple little machines that keep track of addresses, schedules and to-do lists but can also be equipped with a wide range of other software. It's a market becoming ever more crowded with competitors hoping to ride a new wave of computing-to-go. "They created the category," says Jill House, an analyst with International Data Corp., a high-tech research firm based in Framingham, Mass. "They finally found the design, the price and the features that people really wanted." Michael Moskowitz, the sales and marketing manager for 3Com Canada Inc.'s Palm computing division, sums up the recent success: "We hit the sweet spot."

Since the introduction of the first Palm model in 1996, 3Com has sold about three million of the devices. In Canada, the various Palm models command 72 per cent of the market, says Dave Armitage, an analyst with Evans Research Corp. of Toronto.

So what's the fuss about? Priced at about $450, the Palm III -- the most popular model -- is literally a palm-sized, 150-g gadget with a screen measuring eight centimetres by six centimetres. The basic model comes with two megabytes of memory, enough for 6,000 addresses and more than two years' worth of appointments. There is no keyboard. Instead, the owner enters information by scribbling letters on the screen using a modified alphabet called Graffiti (which takes some practise). As well, information can be shared with a desktop computer at the touch of a button; more complicated information can be typed on the computer and downloaded to the handheld machine.

With the right accessories, the Palm can be used as a pager, bar-code reader, a geographic positioning device, or can be equipped with an add-on keyboard and modem. Diabetics can use the machines to keep track of glucose levels, and nurses can use them to record patient information that can be transferred to a hospital's computer system. Naturally enough, a wide variety of games is also available.

Kleinsasser uses a program called PigPad -- a database of all things pork -- which is shared with a piece of software called PigWin running on a desktop computer. In the barn, each sow has a tag in its ear with an identifying number. Kleinsasser enters the number in the Palm and, voila: "In a second, it's all right there, their life histories on the screen." Coming soon, a new application called PigGain will allow him to track what feed his pigs are getting. "It will give us better information on what our herd is doing in the barn," he says.

The booming market in computers that fit the palm is attracting attention from other companies, including Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp. Casio Inc. and Philips Electronics NV are among the firms making comparably priced handhelds running Microsoft's Windows CE -- a slimmed-down Windows.

New competitors will eventually be able to win market share as Microsoft improves its operating system, analyst House believes. But so far, she says, Palm has managed to stay in front: "They're still the pony to bet on." Or, as Kleinsasser might see it, the pig to beat.