There are two main factors driving increased usage of handheld devices in the enterprise. The first is the ever-decreasing cost of hardware. In the week that I write this, Dell is launching its first Pocket PC at a price that is intended to undercut rivals, Hewlett Packard has announced new low-end and high-end iPaqs, and Microsoft and Samsung announced the availability of a new Pocket PC concept design that “dramatically lowers costs and reduces product development time for mobile device OEMs and original device manufacturers.” All this competition among suppliers drives prices lower and makes it more likely than ever that enterprises will consider it a worthwhile investment to issue smart devices to large numbers of their employees.

The devices are becoming more capable as well. Processors are getting faster, and the devices at the low end of the market now come with 32 MB of RAM, compared to 16 MB a short while ago. Higher-end devices routinely come with Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless networking built in, and phone-PDA hybrids such as the Pocket PC phone edition are able to use General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or CDMA2000 packet-switched data communications over mobile phone operators’ networks.

The second key ingredient driving uptake is improved software architectures. The .NET Compact Framework is an example of a managed execution environment. The runtime engine sits on the device and is responsible for managing the execution of .NET applications. This functionality yields a number of benefits, such as memory management, cross-language interoperability, and improved error handling. The .NET Compact Framework also implements a unified, object-oriented, hierarchical, and extensible set of class libraries that encapsulates common and not-so-common tasks into classes that can be called by any application written in any .NET language.