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As anyone who has visited a corporate conference room lately can
tell you, handheld devices are selling pretty well. According to
Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner Group, Inc., shipments of handheld
computers grew over 60% last year, to nearly 4 million units. Just
over 40% of those units, or about 1.6 million, were Palms from 3Com,
say the Dataquest information technology gurus, who were impressed
with the fact that most of 3Com's sales were to new users, which
nearly doubled the Palm computing platform's 1997 installed base.
Clearly, this is good news for 3Com, which embarked last week on
a path toward making even larger inroads in the handheld market with
the release of two new Palm computing devices: the Palm IIIx and the
Palm V. This brings the available number of Palm models to four, as
the two new kids on the block join the well-established PalmPilot
Professional and Palm III product line.
You can get all of the official skinny on the new units from the
3Com URL's at the end of this column, but in brief, the big news about
the new Palm devices is new, advanced LCD screens that are sharper and
provide better visibility in dim room light and in sunlight. And those
of us wedded (for better or worse) to Microsoft Outlook can rejoice,
as the new Palms provide what is described as a "seamless link" to
Outlook, though as I understand it, you must load a software module
into your unit to implement that functionality.
The Palm V is at the high end of the product line ($449 SRP),
featuring a wraparound aluminum case that makes the unit half as thin
as a Palm III, weighing in at only four ounces. To conserve bulk and
accommodate left-handed users, the unit features stylus slots on the
left and right sides of the body. One slot is intended for the unit's
stylus, while the other holds a stylus-shaped assembly that acts as a
hinge for a flip-open cover.
The Palm V runs on a long-life lithium-ion battery that recharges
while the unit is in its cradle, and offers 2 MB of storage. By the
way, the old PalmPilot modem will not work with the new unit, which
accepts a 33.6 kbps modem that attaches to the back of the Palm V and
connects to the HotSync port.
The "x" in Palm IIIx stands, apparently, for "expandable," as the
unit features an open connector for add-on hardware. The Palm IIIx
($369 SRP) comes with Palm OS 3.1, which sounds like - but really
isn't - a revision of the OS 3.0 version that ships with the Palm III.
The upgraded OS takes account of a newer, slightly different
microprocessor called the "Dragonball EZ" embedded in the Palm IIIx,
and is not intended for current Palm devices running Palm OS 3.0. The
Palm IIIx comes standard with 4 MB of memory, which is twice what is
packaged in a Palm III.
All this is well and good, and should result in some good
earnings numbers at 3Com (at least from the Palm division). What has
some current Palm owners upset, however, is how both new units
effectively obsolete a lot of "legacy" hardware, particularly
expansion memory boards. Permit me to digress...
The leading purveyor of PalmPilot expansion memory boards is
Technology Resource Group (TRG), of Des Moines, Iowa. Their
top-of-the-line product has been the SuperPilot-II XL expansion board,
which offers 8 MB of dynamic RAM (DRAM) and 2 MB of Flash memory. The
DRAM, of course, provides the same kind of storage offered by memory
shipped with Palm units, while Flash memory stores the Palm OS and the
standard Palm applications, which leaves something like 800 KB of
Flash memory left over and available for storing applications (those
that work despite being stored in what amounts to read-only memory) as
well as read-only data.
I bought one of these boards for my Professional a few months
ago, and aside from the extra storage (hooray!), I find the device
pretty unremarkable. I experienced no degradation in performance or
significantly shorter battery life, as had been rumored on the edges
of some Internet discussion groups.
At $300 ($250 now that the new Palm models are out), it was a
sizeable investment but one I felt was worth the cost, as it allows me
to walk around with a lot of reference data in my pocket, including a
Russian-English aerospace dictionary. The board, by the way, comes
with a program called FlashBuilder III, which sells for $50 separately
and which helps load applications and data into Flash memory. But now,
I'm *really* digressing, so to get back to what I was saying...
What galls some Palm users is the fact that SuperPilot boards are
incompatible with the Palm IIIx. To add insult to this imagined
injury, TRG's new 8-MB "xtra xtra" board for the Palm IIIx ($149.95
SRP) doesn't add 8 MB of RAM (thus tripling the factory-installed
4 MB), but only 4 MB (doubling it) owing to an apparent design quirk
that disables the factory-installed RAM.
The last straw for these Palm users is the fact that the other
newcomer, the Palm V, is essentially "sealed" and can't have its 2 MB
of memory upgraded at all (according to 3Com), and that modems, cases,
and other accessories for older Palm devices aren't suitable for use
with it. In short, say the disgruntled, their investments - which they
say helped make Palm computing devices the success they are today -
have been all but obsoleted. This is a pretty narrow view, in my
opinion.
Admittedly, I am not deliriously happy over not being able to
install my old (expensive) TRG card in a new Palm, and I'll probably
think longer and harder before upgrading my unit. But after all is
said and done, it is unreasonable to expect hardware designs to be
forever backward-compatible. My desktop, for example, no longer sports
a 5.25-inch floppy drive, and I long ago made my peace with having
thrown out around 30 MB of 16-pin RAM chips I paid a small fortune for
and used on memory cards that are no longer manufactured because
(among other reasons) they no longer even fit in new motherboards.
The fact is that, up to now, Palm devices have been remarkably
backward-compatible. Furthermore, upgrading hardware is always hard,
especially for early adopters and "power" users (examples are legion),
and especially when as yet so few of the new units are actually Out
There being poked and prodded. As far as Palm devices are concerned,
early adopters and "power" users form a pretty small group when
compared to some 3 million other Palm users, most of whom have opened
their Palms only to replace batteries, and for whom the Palm IIIx or
Palm V will be a welcome upgrade.
For info on the Palm V: http://palm.com/iso/u.cgi?n=1
For info on the Palm IIIx: http://palm.com/iso/u.cgi?n=2
For the TRG home page: http://www.superpilot.com/
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