News.com has an interview with Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of both Palm and Handspring. Communicators combine the capabilities of cell phones and organizing devices. Some quotes:
Communicator-like devices will become the center of personal computing, while desktops and laptops will become more like workstations and will be considered accessories to these devices.
We think that many cell phones in the future will have keyboards…Our thinking was, “If we’re going to add the capability of e-mailing and messaging to a product, a little keyboard is better.” It’s faster and more accurate. Once we had designed a keyboard for the Treo, we began to realize that while keyboards are good for text, they could be really powerful for the basic phone. It was a very simple idea: You should be dialing by name and not by number.
If you look inside a communicator, you’ll find two processors: one for the radio and one for the device. Chipmakers are developing a single processor architecture for radios that will be powerful enough to handle organizer capabilities. That will save some money.
