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PALMPILOT READING | PAGE 2 OF 2
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I know an advertising copywriter in New York who just got his Pilot a couple weeks ago. He's spent those two weeks calling acquaintances all over the world looking for friends' phone numbers. "For years I've been living on Post-It notes and gum wrappers," he says. "I figured that if I couldn't find someone within two phone calls, I really didn't need to talk to him."

This is a guy who doesn't own a computer. Not because he's a technophobe -- he uses computers all the time, has one on his desk at work. He just won't buy one. "Hardware has a use-by date, like milk," he says. Dropping two grand at Christmas for something that's just going to go bad before Labor Day makes no sense to him.

But now he has a Pilot, and he's using it for everything, not just phone numbers and addresses. He's dumped subway maps into his Pilot, and restaurant guides, and odds sheets that he reviews on the way to his regular poker games. Even a smutty video. Granted, as he points out, it's just a loop of a few grainy black-and-white frames, barely recognizable on the Pilot's liquid-crystal display. But it's also a hint of the future. "People at my agency laugh when I show them this," he says. "But think about it, I tell them. This is palmtop video."

Uses like these go well beyond the "personal organizer" that the Pilot is sold as. An editor of science-fiction books that I know fell in love with the Pilot when he realized that he could put an entire manuscript into a box that weighs 4.7 ounces and fits into his jacket pocket. "You really have to have spent a decade of your life schlepping 600-page manuscripts around to understand how attractive this is," he says. He admits that he wouldn't use the Pilot's tiny screen -- it's smaller than an index card -- for major editing. But, he says, "An enormous amount of what an editor has to do day in and day out is just reading. These days, if I can get an e-text version of a big document I have to read, the first thing I do is hot-sync it onto my Pilot."

Carry a computer everywhere you go, and you start using it for things you never would have bought it for in the first place. Like keeping your grocery lists, which a surprising number of Pilot enthusiasts do. Explains one, a philosophy professor, "I can enter needs as I note them during the week, and I'm sure to have a list if, say, I want to stop at the store spontaneously on the way home instead of planning a trip." One can be a little too cutting edge, though: A tech writer who shops with his Pilot said, "Someone saw me looking over the products, glancing from the Pilot to the shelves and back, and asked me if we still had the quarts of Langer apple juice still on sale."

These Pilot users are enthusiastic the way that early Macintosh users were. "It's so easy to use, so fun to play with," says my Web-designer friend. "OK, it's also a time suck," she says, acknowledging that while in between jobs she's spending a little more time than she ought to scoping out Pilot Web sites and trying out new programs. Fans like her have taken hold of something that, like the Mac in its youth, is appealing largely because it's so easy to take hold of.

At the same time, the Pilot (as was said of the Mac) doesn't seem to be a "real computer." It doesn't even pretend to be. Even if you buy the wireless modem for your Pilot and use it to pick up your e-mail, it doesn't feel like what you're doing with it is at all the same thing that people do with the computers on their desks.

But it is a real computer. And the more you use one, the harder it is to shake the feeling that the Pilot is closer to what the next computers are going to be like than the contraption on top of your desk is.
SALON | March 10, 1998

Robert Rossney is a writer and geek who lives in Northern California.

Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and talk about PalmPilots and other "personal digital assistants," personal information managers or whatever you call the things.

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R E L A T E D_S T O R Y : Another side of "personal information management" -- inside the cult of the Franklin Planner