JH: (laughing) Yeah, I can. The vision thing. I used to not like that word, but I have to deal with it all the time. The V word. But I guess in some sense, I and the rest of the team here do have some vision about the future. I'll give you some big pictures without giving many details.

One sort of big picture is we think of the handheld device, the PalmPilot, as this window on data that exists elsewhere. The trick is to make it look like you've got it all locally. But in reality, the data is someplace else. The simple model, when we started out with the original PalmPilot was just PIM data that resides on your PC. The whole synchronization process makes it looks like when you change it on your handheld or the PalmPilot, it changes on your desktop. When you change it on your desktop, it changes on the PalmPilot. So its like a window of data that is actually saved and backed up and you print and manipulate it from the desktop if you will. But you have this little window on it.

We've expanded. Now we can say "Where else does data exist?" Well, there's corporate data on the LAN. And we are doing numerous things to make this a window on to LAN-based data. E-mail is one of those. LAN-based E-mail in particular. There's us and some other companies doing some very clever things with corporate databases and syncing over servers and things like that. That's a corporate sort of interest. Then, I think there's a huge opportunity with the Internet. The Internet really does change everything. And its going to be a dominant factor in the future of handheld devices, having a seamless picture of data that exists there and that's distributed there and that's manipulated using IP protocols and Internet tools.

And that's a tremendous opportunity for us. That's really going to influence the future. Along with that comes transactions. Financial transactions and so on, where you can use the handheld device to look at data that may exist in a financial institution or in some sort of transaction-based system. Wherever you find data in the world, you want to basically have a seamless view of it in your pocket. That's a really big 50,000 foot view.

DG: Let's take this into a different direction. This is going to position me pretty clearly in your mind. I carry around this black leather kit that contains a PalmPilot, of course, a MessagePad 2000, a keyboard, a pager, a cell phone and a dictating device. Do you see at some point that I'm not going to have to carry all this stuff with me?

JH: The answer is yes and no. I'm not one of these people who preaches convergence and everything. Take a pager for a start, that's an easy one we can talk about. We can talk about what we're doing. A pager in a PalmPilot makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of people who'd want that. Motorola just announced one and they're getting great reception to it. I think it's going to be a great product.

That doesn't mean that the paging business goes to being like PalmPilots with pagers. The vast majority of pagers are still going to be much smaller, cheaper, clip on your belt type of things. It doesn't mean that they've converging, but there is an overlap. Someone who really carries around a pager all the time and a PalmPilot all the time and their usage model is such that they're not using it while they're climbing telephone poles as a contractor, but it's acceptable to have the pages delivered on a slightly larger device, they'll like that! They'll buy one device and be happy with it.