Sunday, June 06, 1999
Palm VII keeps focus on its task
BY BRUCE SCHWARTZ
USA Today
Palm, the ubiquitous personal digital organizer, has turned VII.
Despite its advancing age (in technology years), it continues to pull off a miracle, staying well ahead of a pack of hungry competitors led by Microsoft.
Its enduring popularity — considering that the system's basics are unchanged since the first-generation Palm Pilot in 1996 — can be credited to elegant simplicity and a focus on task, not technology.
Let the other guy ask where you want to go today. Palm knows what you need to take along.
But change it must, to survive. The VII, bowing in the New York metro area a couple of weeks ago and elsewhere later this year, is the first mass-market, wireless, pocket-size Net accessory. True to the Palm heritage, it tries to do a few things very well. It shows a lot of promise — and a few gaping pitfalls.
Sign-up and sign-on are surprisingly easy. Unlike with cell phones, you register right on the Palm and send your credit information with a tap of its tiny metallic “pen.” Simply flipping up the sidesaddle antenna turns on the Palm and switches to its Net screen.
You won't surf the Web on this board. Palm presumed site-hopping would be unsatisfying on a slow, wireless connection and a gray screen the size of a playing card. Instead, it offers snippets of the Net.
Users fill in abbreviated forms or click on links on the Palm screens to request these “Web clippings.” In return, they get a few facts, a few numbers, a paragraph or two.
Web sites write small programs, called query applications, for users to access that information from the Net. Out of the box, Palm comes with 22 applications, including phone numbers; ATM locators; news from the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC and ESPN; weather from the Weather Channel; and travel guides from Frommer's, Fodor's and Travelocity. More apps can be downloaded from www.palm.net.
I used the VII during the sites' final testing and tuning, so I hesitate to judge specifics of quality or reliability. Most, not all, worked well and responded quickly; some information was wrong, outdated or unavailable.
Most promising are those types of personalized services that take advantage of the mobile link between user and Net. With digital mapping firm Etak, for example, a user will be able to register regular driving routes via a Web site and later retrieve detailed traffic reports for each via the Palm.
Moviefone offers theaters, movies and times by ZIP code.
E-Trade lets you create stock watch lists and retrieve quotes.
With MySimon, comparison-shop the Net even as you stroll a store's aisles.
Many merchants promise that you'll soon be able to order goods, bank and trade stocks via the Palm.
Of more dubious value are such trivial pursuits as a Starbucks locator, horoscopes and an online dictionary.
And you don't want to waste Palm time on trivialities.
The two monthly plans get you 50 kilobytes or 150 kilobytes of data (including Net and e-mail), with extra kilobytes at 30 cents each. Palm says that's enough space for most users; I managed to top the upper limit in five days of moderate use. Talk about clipping; Palm should recalibrate its plans.
The second half of the Palm's Net capabilities is wireless e-mail. With iMessenger you compose, receive and send e-mail via palm.net, the Net address you get with your service. In the interest of brevity and economy, you receive only the first 500 characters, with an option to fetch the rest.
But iMessenger doesn't talk to the Palm's other e-mail application, which is the one that synchronizes with your PC's e-mail software. That's confusing. Plus, there's no way to copy your palm.net e-mail to your PC.
The way the Net access integrates with the rest of the Palm VII needs some polishing as well. You can search for addresses on Yahoo!, for example, and come up with a half-dozen or more. But you can't easily cut and paste portions of the Web into other areas of the Palm, such as the address book.
You can copy only a full page of data, paste it where you want and delete the extraneous 90 percent of the material. It's almost easier to copy it with pencil and paper; for an organizer, that's an especially disorganized touch.
Price is $599, plus wireless service plans costing $9.95-$24.95 a month.
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