DG: Do you feel that being external to the people building the operating system that you'll have not necessarily less feedback to it but certainly less control over what the OS services are for the purposes of your hardware?

JH: Certainly. Before I could just walk over to product marketing or engineering and say "Let's get this going". Now, of course, we're going to be licensees, we have to put our name in the queue with anybody else. I thought through that quite a bit. I think it's going to be manageable. The kind of things that we're going to do, some of them require the involvement of Palm and some of them don't. Clearly you can add things on top of the OS that don't' require the involvement of Palm. And some things at system level that will. But I though through it all pretty much and I think it's all doable with not too much pain. Palm has a reasonably-sized organization to support licensees and OEM [original equipment manufacturers, people who license software, build hardware, and put their own name on it] developers, so they're getting geared up pretty well to handle people like ourselves. So hopefully I'll be testing it out and see if it's working well.

DG: When we did our earlier interview, you scratched a line in the sand and said that it will get no bigger than this, referring to the form factor of the device. Do you see that line changing any at this point? Whether through Palm or yourself or licensees?

JH: You mean getting larger? I can only talk for my new company that our intention isn't to build bigger products, no. That would apply for my new company. Same size or smaller. The handheld spaceÉit's tempting to want to do other things. But the handheld space is so big and so large I believe, that it needs to be developed further before you really sort of branch off into other areas.

DG: When we talked in January, it was just a couple of weeks before the Palm PC had been announced and came out. But I didn't get a chance to get your take on a very similar form factor device in that market. Can I get your opinion on that now?

JH: Before I'd seen the Palm-sized PCs, I had doubts that they would be able to make a really good product. Just knowing Windows and the Windows CE environment, I felt that it would be slow and cumbersome and I felt it would be sort of an ill-fit technology as I understood it. But I wasn't certain of all those things. Until you actually see it and use it you don't really know. I think we've learned from using those WinCE devices that at least at this round Microsoft is going to have a lot of problems trying to sort of emulate the success of Palm. My personal opinion myself, this is not Palm speaking, but my personal opinion is that those products are much to cumbersome to use as a personal information manager. If you tried to use it day-to-day for your calendar, for example, you could get very, very frustrated. Same with the address book. In my opinion. And I think people will understand that and reject them for those problems that are associated with it. I also think they have a problem with battery life and power management and also with synchronization.