Putting wireless network power in the palm

"Cool!" Gearhead was heard to say when a 3Com Palm VII arrived recently. The Palm VII is basically the same machine as the Palm III (2M bytes of memory, a 160-by-160 grayscale screen and an infrared port), but the thing that makes the Palm VII so amazingly cool is built-in wireless network support. Even better, the wireless services add hardly anything to the weight or size of the Palm.

Setup was very easy, taking all of 10 minutes to enter Gearhead's name and establish the wireless service account. Once Gearhead's details were registered, the wireless connection was live, Internet e-mail could be sent and received and selected Web sites could also be browsed - sort of.

The problem with Web content and the Palm is that the average Web page is just a little overweight for a device with a 2M-byte memory. For this reason, 3Com has come up with something called "Web Clipping." Web Clipping is an interesting technology that supplies lighter Web pages to ensure that only suitably sized and structured content is retrieved on a Palm.

The Palm VII comes with a number of special Web Clipping applications to give you access to all sorts of resources: Sports scores from ESPN, package tracking from Fedex, ATM locations from Bank of America and a lot more. And it is pretty simple to create your own Web Clipping applications.

Of course, Gearhead had to show off the Palm VII. At a recent company meeting, the Palm was produced with a minimum of fuss and maximum of visibility. Gearhead's colleagues responded as expected: An instant and jealous cry of "Now what toy have you got, you *&^*&^?" was heard. Score one for Gearhead. Then I received a message. Score one more.

BellSouth's Wireless data network provides the wireless service and costs $9.99 per month for a total of 50K bytes of data (roughly 250 screens of Web pages or messages). You can also pay $24.99 per month for 150K bytes of data (about 750 screens). This is reasonable pricing unless you are Gearhead's partner, Peter Mansfield, who immediately blew the entire month's allowance on researching sports scores. Thanks, Peter.

At present, the Palm VII is only being sold in New York, but should you manage to snag one, you'll find it works in most metropolitan areas.

The potential for this device in a corporate setting is considerable. It provides "step off the plane and check for urgent messages" support as well as all the personal information manager functions a busy IT person needs. There's also support for downloading your regular e-mail into the Palm through the desktop synchronization service. Unfortunately, replying is not really practical with the Palm's pen interface, so this is not so useful.

The Palm VII has a backlight that is great in very low light but less effective than you might hope in a dim room. Another issue is the desktop synchronization software: It is much less intuitive than Gearhead expected.

The combination of the Palm Desktop, the HotSync Manager, the mail setup utility, a utility called PocketMirror and an expense report utility resulted in Gearhead loading the Outlook e-mail inbox into the Palm. As there were a couple of thousand items in the inbox, this was not a good idea. Of course, Gearhead then discovered that a bulk delete function isn't available for Mail on the Palm, and the only choice on a plane trip was to sit there and delete the messages one-by-one to free up enough memory to . . . well, you see the problem.

Despite these criticisms and the rather high price (around $600), the Palm VII has a powerful role in corporate communications - and it is very cool. Gearhead awards the Palm VII eight gear teeth out of ten.

Slip some palm to gh@gibbs.com.