The man from IBM dropped by the other day and offered a peek into his crystal ball.

Inside the crystal ball was a prototype of a new computer, a model running the full version of Windows XP. But it is small — tiny, even. And it has a touch-sensitive screen.

International Business Machines Corp. calls it the Meta Pad. It's bigger than the average personal digital assistant (PDA), but it's also a lot smaller than a laptop. It's even significantly smaller than the latest notebook computers designed to run Microsoft Corp.'s Tablet PC operating system.

What makes the Meta Pad different from the Tablet PC is that it comes in two pieces.

A small docking unit contains the screen, a battery, two USB ports and audio in-and-out jacks. The guts of the machine are in a box no bigger than the hard disk you find in your desktop personal computer or, as IBM measures it, a three-quarter-inch-high stack of three-inch-by-five-inch index cards.

With the screen and battery, the whole unit is more compact than a five-inch-by-seven-inch photograph, although considerably thicker.

The size of this marvel triggered a major discussion in The Globe and Mail office about miniaturization and usefulness. It must have done the same at IBM of Armonk, N.Y., because Big Blue has been testing industry reaction to the Meta Pad at two Comdex shows and with tech journalists.

The Meta Pad can be plugged into a cradle, which will attach it to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. With two cradles, you can carry the whole computer in your pocket and plug it into a similar setup elsewhere. Or it can be plugged into a specially designed IBM ThinkPad-style notebook, inelegantly referred to as a chassis, which will equip the Meta Pad with a larger screen and a real keyboard.

Or the whole thing can be used like a bulky handheld computer, using the Tablet PC version of Windows, which includes handwriting recognition software.

Aside from the marvel of stuffing a tiny 10-gigabyte hard drive, 128 megabytes of RAM and a processor into such a tiny box, the Meta Pad falls right in the middle of the debate about corporate computing.

A recent eInsider column on why PDAs are not being embraced by IT departments resulted in a flood of e-mail, much of it from corporate professionals complaining about the limitations of handheld computers: They force you to work their way; their programs are only partly compatible with systems you know and use every day; they have synchronization issues; and their screens are too small to read comfortably.

The Meta Pad, said the man from IBM, gets around all those issues because the unit is essentially a notebook computer. No need to synchronize. No need to worry about file compatibility.

Even the screen — also the size of an index card, measuring 800 by 480 pixels — is more readable than most handheld devices.

And you can slip the business part of the computer — without the screen and battery part — into your pants pocket without having to shop for suspenders first.

There are obvious drawbacks.

Although IBM hasn't set any price range for it, the Meta Pad couldn't possibly sell for much less than the current Tablet PCs, whose price (from $2,500 to $6,000) is their worst feature.

The cradle and the ThinkPad chassis would not be cheap either. With the guts in a sealed box, there is no real possibility of repair or even replacement of parts.

And everything will have to be IBM's proprietary hardware, at least until (or if) the system catches on.

Sure, the Meta Pad is only a prototype (if it is released, it won't be until late in 2003), and the marketing and design departments haven't yet had a proper run at it. But it is already raising interesting questions. PDA leader Palm Inc. has bet the farm on size; the company crowed when it achieved thickness nirvana at seven millimetres and a size that could fit into a shirt pocket.

When Microsoft released the Pocket PC operating system, manufacturers (especially Compaq's iPAQ) proved that a significant number of people wanted more features and were willing to trade away thinness and lightness to get them: Who cares about a few extra grams if it's going to end up in a purse or attaché case anyway?

But both Palm and Pocket PC devices share certain weaknesses.

A surprising number of people have confessed to being annoyed by having to synchronize their PDAs with desktop computers, a process that is not always easy or even successful.

And they complain about the lack of a keyboard — sure, there are folding portable keyboards for PDAs, but don't they defeat the point of thinness and lightness?

Ultimately, PDA makers will have to figure out what people really want. The ideal is certainly the smallest possible computer, but there are serious limits to how small keyboards and screens can be — human limits, not technological limits. And they should be made to fit seamlessly into our lives and our networks, not the other way around.

The Meta Pad — should it ever appear on the market — will surely raise the ante on these issues.

Personally, I'd like to see the Meta Pad come to life. It might clear the air about all these unresolved marketing strategies.

E-mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca

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