Put Your Office in Your Pocket

In some ways, it's a done deal: In the near future, every roving employee, freelancer or contract worker who needs to keep in touch with the home office while on the road is going to be able to do so with a handheld wireless computing device.

The number of wireless users is expected to rise from 400 million today to more than 600 million in 2001. It's a telecommunications revolution comparable to the rise of the Internet, but the business world has many fewer qualms about wireless than the Internet. Managers and employees didn't know what the Internet could do for their businesses; in contrast, it is easy to understand the benefits of being connected to people and information any time, anywhere.

In the United States, the handheld wireless market is dominated by 3Com Corp. and its Palm Pilot organizers. The latest, the Palm Pilot VII, is touted as the first handheld computer to use wireless links to connect with the Internet. The national rollout of service began this month.

No Palm Pilot as yet includes voice communications, and 3Com is betting that users will be satisfied to continue to carry wireless telephones as separate devices. ''Customers keep saying they want one device that does everything, but the truth is the attributes that make a great phone do not necessarily make a great data device and vice versa,'' says Joe Sipher, the director of 3Com's wireless products division.

Outside the United States, however, a leading consortium may well include telephone capability within its handheld computer. Psion PLC of Britain, which produces the palm-sized organizers most popular in Europe, is heading an alliance with telephone manufacturers Ericsson of Sweden, Nokia of Finland, Motorola of the United States and Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. (better known by its brand name, Panasonic) of Japan.

The joint venture, called Symbian, has signed agreements with telecommunications companies like NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc. (NTT DoCoMo) of Japan and software companies like Sun Microsystems of the United States.

NTT DoCoMo and 3Com also signed an agreement in June aimed at developing new products and services using the Palm platform.

Symbian is working not only to develop a handheld telephone-organizer-computer that competes with 3Com's Palm Pilot family, but also to develop a version of Psion's Epoc operating system, which will compete with Microsoft's Windows CE handheld operating system.

An advantage for Symbian is that its handhelds will rely on the GSM standard that prevails in Europe, Africa and most of Asia. In contrast, in the United States, wireless standards are relatively fragmented.

Timothy Harper