The Joys of Wireless Messaging

Back when I was at CMP the first time around (as editor of Network Computing), the Radiomail application went through our staff like wildfire, and soon everyone was e-mailing each other rather than doing just about anything else, including paying attention at various meetings or writing their stories. The level of wireless e-mail got so bad that at one point we had to ban carrying the units into meetings so we could get some real work done.

(As a side note, this pervasive multitasking continues apace today: When I was last in my high school networked classroom, I had great difficult getting my students to pay attention to my lesson because they were too busy surfing the net for their overnight CounterStrike ratings and catching up on their e-mail. This situation will only get worse as more colleges and schools install wireless networking, and as more students carry around laptops. At least in my wired classroom, I was able to unplug the Ethernet jacks to get my students to pay attention to me -- a dramatic moment, too say the least.)

Anyway, back to the present day. A couple of us at VARBusiness had received Palm i705s, and as an experiment I downloaded the special wireless AIM software that works on it. I wanted to see how far things have come in the decade-plus since Radiomail.

It didn't take too long to install the Palm client, once I figured out that I also needed to update the Palm OS firmware as well. (The AIM Web site, normally an example of clarity, mentions this in its FAQs, but it buries the factoid and doesn't have the link to the firmware readily available. No big deal, but it would have been nice to know this up-front.) It works pretty much like the desktop AIM client, including being able to view your buddy lists and insert smiley faces into your conversations.

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I found the same level of annoying connectivity that I initially had with Radiomail -- the ability for anyone to reach me no matter where I was during the day. Several of my IMs were received during staff meetings, which began to take on a familiar level of rudeness. The difference, though, is a subtle one. E-mail is a store-and-forward system: You send a message, wait and send one back. IM is very much an interactive set up: You are conversing, in near-real time, with several people, and your correspondents have a very low tolerance for waiting for your replies. I am not proficient at Graffiti, the handwriting-recognition system for the Palm, so my replies took longer. All this interacting means the IM application is a lot more intrusive than plain, old wireless e-mail, and your colleagues' tolerance for your multitasking will probably be a lot less.

We at VARBusiness use AIM all the time, and we have staff spread around the country. It is really a big time-saver, especially if you have to get a quick question answered. Nevertheless, we adults can't hold a candle to the kind of usage my teen-aged daughter has. IM is clearly her mission-critical app. She documents her movements and actions so completely on IM that one could write a book on her schedule and activities just from her away messages alone.

So I brought the Palm home and had her try it out. She very quickly was timing the delay in sending messages back and forth between a regular wired desktop and a second account that she had up and running on the Palm within a few seconds. (No, I didn't suggest this, but she is her father's daughter, after all.) The average delay was around 5 or 6 seconds, and it wasn't symmetrical, meaning that sending an IM to the wireless network took longer than receiving one. I didn't have a ready explanation for that circumstance, but figure it is just one of those wireless network oddities.

But after a few minutes, she was back on the desktop, typing furiously to her closest dozen or so friends. She isn't an expert on Graffiti either, though she did admit that with the Palm keyboard she would probably have continued to use the wireless version for a bit longer. She did point out (again without any prompting from me) that having AIM anywhere could get rude when one was in meetings or with friends. I agreed with her.

So, it remains to be seen whether I end up carrying the Palm around with me or not. With spring around the corner, I still have a few weeks left to decide.