MAY WONG AP Technology Writer

July 27, 2003

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) - Jeff Hawkins hopes to one day unlock the elegant technical details of the human brain and spur on a whole new generation of thinking machines.

But the lanky inventor still has his mind very much in the present - his challenge today is how to energize his struggling Handspring Inc. by merging it with Palm Inc., the company he founded several years earlier.

Considered the father of handheld computing, Hawkins is returning to Palm Inc. at an auspicious time, when powerful processors and more tightly integrated circuits can put all the computing that most people need into a shirt pocket.

The ever-energetic Hawkins, 46, has long predicted an untethered, mobile future for computing. Now, he's planning to take his mantra further, making handhelds the central device in people's lives.

Hawkins carries the infectious enthusiasm of an idealist. He has the smarts to break down presentations in simple-to-swallow terms and the charisma to make listeners share his excitement over such engineering details as minimizing the taps needed to get to the ``today'' calendar on one of his devices.

It was Hawkins who conceived the original PalmPilot, carving a prototype one night out of scrap wood and a stylus whittled from a pair of take-out chopsticks.

It went against conventional wisdom - he wanted a compact handheld that did not replicate all the battery-draining functions of a PC. Users would have to learn a new kind of writing to input data, which would synchronize with a PC.

Most of all, it would be affordable.

``I thought it was the stupidest idea in the world,'' recalled Danny Shader, chief executive of Good Technology Inc., an e-mail service provider for handhelds. At the time, Shader was working at GO, a pen-based computing company. Now he and other early skeptics sell products for an entire industry Hawkins helped create.

Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky founded Palm in 1992 and debuted the PalmPilot in 1996, launching the personal digital assistant market after other companies had already spent a combined $1 billion on flops.

The four pre-launch years were rough. Deals with prospective hardware partners fell through, financing was tenuous at best, and Palm's staff of 27 lost confidence at times.

``It's the whole crossing of the desert thing - `We're not going to make it. Let's change direction,' But Jeff brought this gravity, and told everyone, `We're doing the right thing,''' said Joel Jewitt, one of Palm's first hires. ``The initial idea is 20 percent of it. The rest of it is getting other people to get it done, and that's what he's good at.''

For Hawkins, a married father of two teenage daughters, the PalmPilot and subsequent handheld endeavors are byproducts of his larger ambition to figure out how the brain works.

Born in Huntington, N.Y. into a family of engineers, Hawkins continues the legacy of his father, a serial inventor who once created an air-cushion sailboat that was inflated by vacuum-cleaner motors and was large enough to carry a 50-piece orchestra.

Once, when the teenaged Hawkins and his friends were playing kettle drums on it, the boat got windswept and slammed into a railroad bridge, causing a Manhattan commute nightmare.

After graduating from Cornell University's engineering school in 1979, Hawkins landed a job at GRiD Systems, one of the first laptop computer makers. At the same time, he developed a deep fascination with neuroscience and quit in 1985 to study the brain at the University of California at Berkeley.

No professors, however, would support his proposed postgraduate work on human memory, and Hawkins returned two years later to high tech, hoping to make enough money to eventually fund his brain research.

Hawkins' work on cognitive patterns later became the foundation of his patents on pattern recognition and the handwriting recognition program used on Palm devices.

Seeking autonomy, Hawkins, Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan left Palm, then a unit of 3Com Corp., to found Handspring in 1998.

Hawkins again designed a successful PDA - this time with an expansion slot that can turn the device into a cell phone, MP3 music player, GPS receiver or digital camera. Handspring remained the No. 2 PDA maker for years behind Palm, even as big-name companies such as Compaq, Casio and Hewlett-Packard joined the competition.

Handspring's latest venture, into so-called smartphones, culminates years of development to converge the power of a personal organizer with the near-ubiquity of cell phones.

But Handspring's leap last year from selling PDAs to only smartphones was costly amid the downturn and looming competition from rich rivals like Nokia. The small Mountain View-based company ultimately decided in June to return to Palm's more established fold.

If shareholders and federal regulators approve, the two companies will merge in the fall, bringing Palm's core team of founders full circle.

Competitors privately concede that Handspring is an innovator in the smartphone category with its Treo, which is compact enough - even with its built-in keyboard - to be an attractive cell phone.

But analysts say Handspring, which has never been profitable, lacks the marketing and financial power to propel this largely unproven segment.

Hawkins would have liked to see Handspring succeed independently. But much as he waved goodbye to his Graffiti handwriting software that was a key factor in Palm's success - the new Treos have tiny keyboards instead - Hawkins sees the merger with Palm as just another logical business step.

Hawkins hopes the Palm merger gives Handspring the resources it needs to make the Treos a top seller.

``We are planning more products now than we would have felt more comfortable building on our own,'' he said, declining to elaborate.

And though the PDA pioneers left Palm over 3Com's refusal at the time to spinoff of Palm, ``there's absolutely no bitterness'' in returning, Hawkins said.

``I'm emotional about the future,'' he said. ``I'm not emotional about the past.''

If mobile computing becomes as ubiquitous and powerful as he envisions, then Hawkins can devote more time to his greater passion of brain research.

Last year, he formed a nonprofit research organization, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, to study theories of how memory plays a role in prediction and perception.

Once that mystery is solved it can be applied to silicon chips that could act as the brains of intelligent machines, Hawkins says with absolute conviction. And yet another new industry will be born.

``It's not just a science, there's a technology behind it,'' said Hawkins. ``We're going to build machines that work like your brain cortex works.''

Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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