New Wireless PalmPilot
For Internet Is Limited
FOR YEARS, mobile computer users have yearned for a
small, wireless computer that would allow them to easily send and receive e-mail,
and use the Internet, anywhere. Many attempts have been made to satisfy this
demand, but none has been a broad, popular success.
Now, Palm Computing, the maker of the world's
best hand-held computers, is going after that
holy grail. Next week in New York, Palm will roll
out a version of its wildly popular PalmPilot
organizer with built-in wireless Internet
connectivity.
If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about Walter
S. Mossberg's column, please send e-mail to mossberg@wsj.com.
I've been testing the new model, called the Palm VII, and found that, in general, it's
the kind of elegant, simple and effective product for which Palm has become justly
famous. Nonetheless, the hand-held's e-mail and Web access systems have some
significant drawbacks and limitations, compared with normal Internet access. And
like every product trying to use today's limited wireless networks, the new Palm
costs a premium to buy and to use. So it will appeal mainly to people who absolutely
must have access to e-mail and online information on the move -- and who can
afford to feed that need.
The Palm VII is nearly identical to the company's mainstream Palm III model. It has
all of the older version's calendar, contact list and other functions, plus the wireless
connectivity features. The only physical difference is that the new model is slightly
longer and has a slim, flat plastic antenna tucked into an indentation along the right
edge.
But the new model costs $599, twice as much as the Palm III. And to use the Palm
VII's wireless features, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $9.95 or $24.95
to Palm's proprietary network, Palm.Net, depending on how much data you expect to
send and receive.
The cheaper plan gets you only 50 kilobytes of data, or about 150 screens of
material. The costlier plan provides 150 kilobytes, or about 450 screens of data.
After you exceed these limits, you pay 30 cents a kilobyte, which is about 1,000
characters. That means heavy users are likely to run up a stiff bill. On my basic plan
account, I got up to $16 after a week of heavy testing. The company is offering the
Palm VII only in New York at first, though units sold there will work in any of 260
U.S. cities. Palm expects to sell its wireless machine nationally later this year.
THE BEST THING about the Palm VII is that it's simple and reliable. It uses the
familiar and excellent Palm user interface. For instance, when you lift the antenna,
the unit automatically displays a catalog of online features. You can activate your
online account in a few minutes, right from the device, and I found that the wireless
connectivity worked well from a variety of East Coast locations.
Because the wireless network is slow and costly and the hand-held's screen is small,
Palm wisely decided not to enable full-blown Web access from the Palm VII. Instead,
the machine fetches abbreviated all-text versions of Web pages, called "Web
clippings," from selected Web sites that care to prepare them. For instance, you can
download news from sources like ABC and The Wall Street Journal. Or you can get
stock quotes from E*Trade; sports scores from ESPN; travel information from
Frommer's, Fodor's and Travelocity; driving directions from MapQuest and reports
on current traffic conditions from Etak. More are promised.
The clippings aren't retrieved with a Web
browser but with tiny application
programs that work by presenting you
with a menu of topics or a search form.
Then they go out to the Web and get the
information you requested. A bunch of
the applications come loaded on the
device. Others can be downloaded from
the Palm VII Web site. To start, there are a
few dozen Web clipping applications, but
hundreds of Web sites have signed up
with Palm to offer the clippings, so many
more are likely to appear.
So what are the drawbacks? Well, the
e-mail system requires you to have a separate e-mail address and doesn't integrate
well with your PC-based e-mail account. Also, it can't handle attachments and
doesn't save copies of messages you send, so you can't be sure what you've
written. To see sent messages, you have to go to Palm's Web site with a PC and
instruct the system to forward them to your PC, which is a pain.
Furthermore, some of the Web clipping programs, while clever in concept, seem
clumsy or pointless. I tested about 20 of them, with mixed results. Downloads of
news stories, stock quotes and sports scores were naturals, and worked fine. But it's
hard to imagine paying by the kilobyte to look up a dictionary definition or check a
movie time or a horoscope. Also, some of the programs worked poorly. I never
could get a retail store locator program, by Ajaxo, to work well. And ABC News
insists on downloading graphics and unusable links to the Palm device, which runs
up your bill.
On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by a program I had at first thought
frivolous, Etak's highway-traffic monitoring application. On the way to the airport
the other day, I used the Palm VII in the back seat of a cab to learn in the nick of time
from Etak about a huge freeway tie-up that hadn't been mentioned on the radio.
Overall, Palm has done a decent job with this machine. Still, if the e-mail program had
been integrated with desktop e-mail and there were more and better applications, the
Palm VII would better justify its high price.
You can now catch my technology commentaries on TV every Thursday on
CNBC's "Power Lunch" show. Check local listings for viewing times in your
city.
For answers to your computer questions, check out my Mossberg's Mailbox
column in today's Tech Center.
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