OmniSky

At the top, a woman stands in a kitchen that looks as though every household demand has arrived at once. Children, food, toys, and a telephone cord converge around her. Lower down, the same blue-tinted world becomes a restaurant, where a woman extends a handheld across the table. OmniSky places its device in both scenes, asking the reader to imagine a little control over the interruption rather than an empty calendar. The two photographs make “from anywhere” feel less like geography than a promise about time.

The narrow blue column does the practical selling. Its list is unusually specific: up to six existing email accounts, web access outside the office, named destinations such as Yahoo!, ticketmaster.com, and Barnes & Noble.com, and compatibility with the Palm V and Handspring Visor Platinum. The device at the top and the four small screen views below serve as exhibits. They show what a user might tap, though their tiny type is a reminder that mobility still came with a small display. The footnote narrows the headline’s reach to 118 metropolitan statistical areas and says the handheld is sold separately.

The household scene also changes the meaning of productivity. “Get things done” can describe answering mail between other obligations, but the picture leaves open whose obligations those are and whether instant access relieves or extends them. A current phone makes email and web access ordinary in many places. This ad records the moment when carrying that access was sufficiently new to need a full explanation and a coverage footnote.

For a beginning copywriter, the sentence “as soon as you think of them” compresses desire and action into one beat. “Think it. Do it.” repeats that sequence in four short words, while the long list of sites and device names gives it a practical landing place. The useful technique is to let a compact slogan carry the emotional promise and let precise copy expose its limits.

OmniSky was a wireless data service for handheld devices. EarthLink’s 2001 annual report records its agreement to buy OmniSky assets and subscribers through bankruptcy proceedings, completed in January 2002. OmniSky no longer operates as the standalone service advertised here.

The customer’s wish to act on a thought wherever they happen to be has endured. The separate Palm hardware, service subscription, named portal list, telephone order line, and carefully qualified coverage belong to a different arrangement for reaching the internet.