Gadget Freaks: Smaller, smarter, saner

Converging in Your Pocket

Gadgets don't eliminate inefficiencies, people who use gadgets do. And those who use them well continually research the next wave of offerings, develop consistent gadget-selection criteria, and embrace the pitfalls and frustrations attached to early adoption. "When you're an early adopter, you have to take as a given that you're going to have problems," says Almassy, who has sprinted back to his gate after finding the Palm Pilot slot on his briefcase unzipped and empty in the airport parking lot. "You do get frustrated, but it's like playing golf. You can get frustrated when you make bad shots, but you have to put it aside and move forward. Otherwise, your score will really be bad."
The most popular types of technology among gadgeteers fall into three areas: PDAs (e.g., Handspring Visors and Treos, the Palm VII, the iPAQ pocket PC from Compaq) and other handhelds (e.g., the Blackberry portable e-mail device and MP3 players); a bucket I'll call "applications" (e.g., wireless networks, infrared connections between devices, AOL Instant Messenger, and videoconferencing software and hardware), and cell phones.
PDAs, with their scheduling and contact management functionality and the capability (mainly through add-on modules) of blossoming into global positioning systems, digital cameras, video games, MP3 players, digital voice recorders, and even cell phones, tend to rate highest on gadgetometers. PDAs seem to be evolving in the direction of laptops (which can never get slim enough for gadget freaks), without sacrificing their portability. The iPAQ Pocket PC, for example, runs a version of Microsoft Windows and contains an Intel processor and 64 megabytes of memory — while weighing in at less than 7 ounces in a 5.3-inch by 3.3-inch package.

Despite their mandatory status in the consulting world, cell phones, which are rapidly converging with PDAs in single devices like the Kyocera Smartphone, Handspring Treo, and the new Blackberry, rate lowest on most gadgetometers. They're valuable, fairly reliable, and extremely cost-effective now, but exhibited too many flaws for too long. A beta tester on version 1.0 of the PDA, the 1993-era Apple Newton, Almassy describes himself as a "late adopter" of the cell phone.
"I'm still suffering from some of the peculiarities of cellular technology," admits Larry Quinlan, the Atlanta-based director of systems and technology for New York–based Deloitte Consulting. Quinlan, who as CIO of his firm is to Deloitte Consulting what "Q" is to MI6 in the James Bond films, owns two PDA/cell phone devices, one that works over the mobile telephone system in the U.S. and the other that works with the system in Europe and Asia.
"My ideal gadget would contain a PDA, telephone, and e-mail in a fairly slim device that fits into my pocket," says Quinlan, whose office with its piles of handheld devices and a portable videoconferencing unit calls to mind Q's lair. "The communication would have to be always-on, high-speed wireless. And it would have to be able to handle e-mail attachments and communicate wirelessly or via infrared with your server or laptop so that when you delete a message on it, the message also is deleted from the system. I think it's getting there, but the GPRS (general packet radio service, a communication service that provides faster data transfer rates) is going to take a little while." He would also like to see a dose of old-fashioned e-mail etiquette (brief, to-the-point notes with a more considerate use of attachments) accompany the explosion of portable e-mail devices. "I receive more than 200 e-mails a day," he says. "Half of them have attachments, so a Blackberry, which is very popular in our firm right now, doesn't work well for me."

The Matrix

Consultants learn to use "GPRS" and other gadgetese in their sentences by reading, by comparing notes and, most important, by doing.
Kupbens reads weekly Wired News updates on his Palm.
David Donnan, vice president of A.T. Kearney in Chicago and unofficial King of All Gadgets (see "Meet Inspector Gadget"), reads voraciously about new technology, especially on the plane. But he avoids technology magazines — "By the time the technology is written about, it's usually old," he says — in favor of clicking through CNET and other sites. "I'm interested in more obscure channels," he notes, "and I lean toward Japanese technology. It's more of a fishing expedition in that there is no single place I go to find out what's going on."
One of the first U.S. buyers of the Cybiko, a GameBoy/Palm Pilot hybrid first marketed to Japanese children, Donnan toyed with the device while thinking about how it might benefit his clients in the food and retail industries. And really, why wouldn't he? After all, the Cybiko is a short-proximity device that lets kids page (through a coding system) each other and play games within a limited range, such as a school or a mall.
"What if you swiped your loyalty card to get a shopping cart when you walked into the grocery store?" Donnan wonders. "If there were proximity sensors at the end of each aisle and a 50-cent LCD panel with sensors in your cart, the store could personalize its advertising to each shopper."
That curious creativity fuels new-product research conducted by gadget freaks, who respond to new devices like an 11-year-old science fair finalist handed a Radio Shack gift certificate. "I've watched my kids use technology," says Almassy. "When the computer bombs, they just start it up again. When it happens to somebody my age, we get a little concerned. We're worried about screwing up the machine or losing what we're doing. But those are givens in the technology world."    

Both Donnan and Almassy installed wireless networks in their home. Donnan has also installed Webcams that capture the view from his vacation home in the Canadian Rockies and used a PowerPoint projector to beam PlayStation2 video games onto a church wall for his sons' youth group.
"A lot of us have a severe case of upgrade disease," says Peter Nikolaidis, technical director of Paradigm Consulting Co., a small systems integration and Web design firm in Bethel, VT, which is located on-line at www.gadgeteer.com thanks to Nikolaidis' early adoption of the URL. "The gee-whiz quotient of a new gadget is what appeals to me. But it's through my relationships with clients that I determine whether there is a practical use."
Kupbens describes a matrix to explain how he decides whether to add, subtract, or pass on new gizmos. His x-axis consists of three criteria: Increasing Productivity (How does this help me do my job better?), Enhancing Connectivity (Does this improve my access to the rest of my firm, my customers, and my friends and family?), and Maintaining Sanity (How does this device improve my mental health while I face the rigors of heavy travel and high-pressure engagements?).    
Those three columns cut against Practicality on the y-axis, which can be divided into two rows: weight and size. "When I had a boat anchor for a laptop, I refused to carry it around with me," says Almassy. "I had a bad back, and one of the reasons I had a bad back was from carrying that damn thing around." Kupbens jettisoned the Palm keyboard and a digital voice recorder from his travel bag because both items occupied too much space in comparison with the meager productivity/connectivity/sanity returns they delivered.

Kupbens' Law

Many gadget freaks rave about the connectivity benefits of a technology without much gee-whiz traction that was originally targeted to Web-surfing teens: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
"I use Instant Messenger extensively with my family," says Donnan. "I can chat with my sons whenever they're on their computers. And we send digital photos back and forth when I'm traveling." The chat software, which probably is loaded on your laptop, indicates to users when their buddies are on-line and provides private chat rooms for real-time e-mail exchanges.
Kupbens also uses AIM with his wife, "so that we can exchange information that would generally wait until the end of the day, like relaying someone's phone number." He believes that casual exchanges help tighten a connection that is too frequently stretched by his business travels. "My philosophy on contact with my family," he says, spelling out Kupbens' Law, "is that five-minute conversations throughout the day do a heck of a lot to maintain that connection." Wireless PDAs, portable e-mail devices, AIM, and cell phones (with their text messaging capability) enable Kupbens and other consultants to conveniently forge those connections no matter how far away they are.
AIM also has significant business benefits. "Kearney has embraced AOL Instant Messenger to the extent that it has become one of the key communications tools within our operations practice," Kupbens says. "So, we'll receive notes from the head of the operations practice that say, 'Hey, everyone get on AIM.' And then when you're on, you can have a very rapid discussion about important issues. And it doesn't require a thousand voice mails or e-mails."

Low Man on the PDA Pole

The main business benefits gadgets deliver, says Quinlan, are greater efficiency and effectiveness. PDAs enable consultants to prune mundane tasks, such as erasing calendar items, printing out lists of phone numbers, staring at airport monitors, asking for directions, and transcribing notes. Cell phones and handheld e-mail devices hasten communications. "Becoming more productive is part of the benefit," says Kupbens. "But gadgets also give you more options. If I'm stuck in an airport, I can send a fax. I can tune out travel frustrations while listening to my iPod. Instead of grabbing a magazine from the airplane rack, I can pull up Economist editorials or Wired News on my PDA. I can read something that's productive or interesting, as opposed to simply accepting what the environment gives me."
That "proactivity" extends to clients. "I receive comments from around the world about how important it is to them that I'm responsive," Almassy says, echoing other gadget aficionados. "Clients get ahold of me because they need an answer immediately. Technology allows me to stay in touch with these people on a very current basis. Besides, many clients use these devices, and you need to look like the executives you're working with." When he encountered a roadblock in his home WAN installation, Almassy consulted with a client whose IT team had just finished setting up a wireless network in his own home.

Gadgets also figure into the fabric of consulting culture. A communal gadget pile at Paradigm Consulting includes a Pilot 1000, the first version of the Palm Pilot. "It still works fine," Nikolaidis notes with pride. "It's probably worth $10 on the market now, but it still comes in handy, especially if you don't have a PDA." New, PDA-less Paradigm hires receive the community pilot until they're ready to upgrade, at which point the 1000 returns to the firm's free box. "We hired a new field technician, just out of college, who wasn't ready to invest in a new PDA," Nikolaidis says. "But he was writing things on scraps of paper, so I handed him the Pilot. Now, he's happy as a clam."
Piles of outdated devices mark a final commonality among gadget freaks. "I probably have more cords and cables than anyone," says Donnan, who counts cell phones ("big clunkers"), discarded PDAs, and early MP3 players as part of a trash heap that his sons probe for recyclables. "My 14-year-old," he adds, "now uses my old Palm III." Like Nikolaidis, Almassy still possesses the original Palm Pilot. He also owns the original Newton and an electronic Rolodex that resembles a credit card with a miniature keyboard. "Actually, they still work," he says, offering the gadget-freak tag line.
The value of the gadget heaps is in the connections that they provide to past engagements. Kupbens, another early adopter, still has his Newton, which — he emphasizes — still works. And while the device is worth less than the cost of a few PDA article downloads, to Kupbens the connection it provides remains priceless.    
"When my son was born, it wasn't quite as common as it is now to have a videotape in the delivery room," he recalls. "But I had my Newton with me and I used it to record his first cry. I have the sound file with his first sounds. To me, that was a life-enhancing technology."

Sidebar: Meet Inspector Gadget

You know you're a gadget freak if you..
• have ever been a beta tester.
• regularly say, "I have the original!"
• wish GPRS would hurry up and get here.
• use phrases like "globally ubiquitous GSM"  and "incredibly cool" in the same sentence.
• describe yourself, with a straight face, as an "early adopter."
• regularly say, "And it still works!"

Consultants are a tech-savvy bunch. And the tech-savviest of all, based on at least one informal sampling, is A.T. Kearney vice president David Donnan.
Donnan installs radio-frequency devices in his kitchen, links his gadgets via infrared connections, programs his porch light to turn on and off based on the sunlight at the geographic coordinates of his Chicago home, and contemplates how the technology driving a Japanese handheld game might improve grocery stores.
His at-home forays into digital video editing (a son's school project), X10 technology (which enables him to control lights and other electronic appliances via remote control, or remotely from his laptop), and wireless networks pollinate his consulting in the food and consumer products, retail, and technology industries. "I don't think there always is going to be one technology or one device that will solve a problem," he says. "It's how you put the pieces together into a system that I think is more intriguing."

In addition to a cell phone and laptop, the current version of Donnan comes loaded with a wireless Palm VII and thumb drives. Thumb (or pen or pocket) drives range in size from 16 megabytes to 1 gigabyte and connect to USB ports on laptops or desktops. "They're about the size of a small pack of gum," he explains, noting that he uses the drive to transport large files such as PowerPoint presentations.
But Donnan also earns his King of All Gadgets crown because of his practical approach to assessing devices. He praises Motorola TalkAbouts, old-fashioned walkie-talkies in an updated package, because they provide a fulfilling solution to a specific problem — in this case, how he, his wife, and their sons can maintain contact while skiing different runs on their vacations in the Colorado Rockies. Plus, he bought the TalkAbouts and his thumb drive (as did this writer after speaking to Donnan) for a song on eBay.
What ultimately attracts Donnan to gadgets is their practical application and their potential inspiration for solving client problems. That explains his fascination with the Cybiko game or an early MP3 player. "I'm always looking for more of the practical applications," Donnan says. "I haven't bought a Blackberry. It's a great gadget, but I'm trying to avoid becoming more wired. I think that some people wear as a badge of honor the fact that they get e-mails every 20 seconds. I don't want that."
What he wants is better battery technology. "The issue I have with all of these devices is that their batteries die too quickly," he adds. "And my biggest complaint is all of the different adapters that I have to use. My Nomad, a 6-gigabyte MP3 player, takes a different connector than my computer does, than my cell phone does, than my Palm does. If they could come up with a universal connector, that would be a big breakthrough."

Sidebar: Sharpening Your Circuitry

Looking to get into the gadget game?
Try the following Web sites:
• www.wired.com/news/gizmos — A good source for gadget news.
• www.cnet.com — Ditto. Plus, it's a favorite of the King of All Gadgets.
• www.vindigo.com — A subscription service, recommended by A.T. Kearney principal Robert Kupbens, for PDAs (Palm and Pocket PC operating systems) and cell phones that provides current music, film, dining, and museum information (plus directions and ATM locations) in major cities.
• www.memoware.com — A massive clearinghouse of PDA downloads (e.g., New York subway maps and schedules, CIA World Fact Book, five-star hotels in Singapore, ferry schedules for Sydney, U.S. Krispy Kreme locations, and much more).
• www.usbdrive.com — This vendor of thumb drives offers a good introduction to the devices (though true gadget freaks would use eBay to get a better deal).
• http://whatis.techtarget.com — Bookmark this glossary and you'll be fluent in "Bluetooth" (a short-range wireless technology), "GPRS," "WAN," and other gadget lingo in less time than it takes to synch your Palm.