The new 3Com Palm VII connected organizer is just about everything you'd want in a pocket computer: It's useful, easy to operate and wirelessly connected. But the price of the connectivity is far beyond what most road warriors would be willing to pay. The Palm VII is essentially a Palm III with wireless connectivity built in. While there are plenty of wireless solutions for palm-sized computers, the Palm VII's is by far the most elegant and the easiest to set up and use.
This latest version of the Palm is not the most advanced 3Com device in all respects. It offers neither the Palm IIIx's superior operating system and memory, nor the Palm V's stylish svelteness and rechargeable battery. The battery life is half that of the Palm III-the Palm VII will runs through two AAA batteries in about two or three weeks. It's also significantly bigger and heavier -- and in my opinion, uglier -- than any other Palm, making it too big for some shirt pockets, despite 3Com's ad pitch. For comparison, it's about twice as thick as the Palm V, and about 3/4 of an inch longer. And it doesn't come with a protective screen as do the Palm III and IIIx models.
Then there's the price, the highest in the Palm family. The unit itself costs $599, but there's an ongoing charge for the wireless service. Monthly service is $9.99 at a minimum, but more realistically you'll spend several times that given the limited access the basic plan allows and the steeply incremental costs of exceeding the limit. So if you're looking for a bargain, keep looking.
But if you can put up with these shortcomings, you get the ability to pay bills and transfer funds from a taxi cab, trade stocks during a boring meeting, and send and receive e-mail from almost anywhere.
The new Palm comes with access to 22 mostly impressive and free third-party wireless-content providers, including ABCNEWS.com, Bank of America, MovieFone, UPS and so on. Most of these services require the easy installation of a custom application; some are already installed. 3Com promises that many more content providers will come online over the next year.
Getting Connected
The Palm VII connects via radio waves to the BellSouth Wireless Data network, which covers most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. However, Montana, Wyoming, Hawaii and Alaska aren't covered at all, and other states have coverage in just one or two cities.
The cost of connectivity is by far the biggest "gotcha" of the Palm VII. The two basic option plans are $9.99 per month for basic and $24.99 for extended service, plus a $19.99 setup fee for each. The basic plan limits you to 50KB (that's right: kilobytes!) of data, while the extended plan covers 150KB per month. That's about 150 screenfulls and 450 screenfulls of information per month, respectively. If you exceed either limit, they'll charge you 30 cents for each additional kilobyte. That's a dime for every screenfull of information.
Just to give you an idea of how hard it would be to stick to the basic plan, that would cover only 30 e-mail messages, 20 stock quotes, 10 sports scores, 10 traffic reports and 10 weather reports per month. (This sample usage comes from the Palm VII wireless service plan documentation.) That works out to about one e-mail message per day, one or two stock quotes every other day, and one sports score, one traffic report and one weather report every three days. For $24.99 ($300 per year) you get three times that-roughly three e-mail messages a day, about three stock quotes each day, and so on.
Mercifully, the iMessenger e-mail application receives only the first two screens of any long e-mail message (20 cents worth). If you want to get the rest of the message, you can click on a couple of buttons and download it.
These service plans are practical if you want to receive only one or a few e-mails a day, and rarely connect to take advantage of the other great applications and services being offered. But for normal use - which would include sending and receiving dozens of e-mail messages per day and accessing some of the other services at least 10 times per day - expect to pay hundreds of dollars per month in service fees.
Getting slapped with bills like this won't faze Wall Street firms for whom up-to-the-second stock information is everything and money is no object. But 3Com must rethink this unrealistic pricing plan if it expects the device to be a hit with business travelers, salespeople or consumers. Accessing information wirelessly can be very slow going, taking anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds for every tap of the pen. The ABCnews.com service, for example, is hierarchical, and requires drilling down three or four layers to get to a story. Each layer requires a wait of between 10 and 15 seconds. The Wall Street Journal site required waits of up to 30 seconds per tap. Searching services such as the bundled US West DEX Yellow pages took about 10 seconds, which feels slow for a search. The sluggish access is partly a limitation of the BellSouth network, which tops out at about 9.6 kilobits per second. Performance may decrease further as more users come online. But having said all that, I was extremely impressed with the performance of the iMessenger e-mail application and service. I was consistently able to receive messages in my desktop inbox just 10 seconds after sending them from the Palm device, and vice versa. Incidentally, 3Com is your ISP for the Palm VII. You can't use another ISP, nor can you use 3Com as your ISP for your PC or any other wireless computer. In addition, you can't use your existing e-mail address to send and receive messages on the Palm VII, though of course you can set up an agent on your desktop to forward mail to the device. When you sign up for the service, Palm assigns you with a unique @palm.net address. The Palm VII is particularly well suited for online banking, shopping and other e-commerce tasks. 3Com has done an admirable job of building in solid security features that assure private transactions, including Secure Sockets Layer support, bullet-proof encryption, message integrity checking and BellSouth network authentication. All packets travel through palm.net servers, ensuring only trusted data gets to your Palm. Wireless access to content and services helps mitigate the claustrophobic 2MB memory/storage maximum for the Palm VII. Instead of installing a dictionary, for example, you can use the bundled Merriam-Webster applet to look up words from a database so big it could never fit on any Palm device.
Until some software company creates the means to do so, you cannot browse the web using a Palm VII. Instead, the device uses "Web Clipping," a proprietary means of getting information by which content providers reformat real web content specifically for the Palm VII. The process strips out all the graphics and other bloated and extraneous stuff, and delivers content formatted for the Palm VII's low-bandwidth communications and tiny monochrome screen.
The Palm VII does not replace a pager, as it does not support notification. That would require that the device be always on, drastically shortening battery life. If you have e-mail waiting or incoming stock information, you must turn the Palm on and check for it. In keeping with the Palm philosophy of hypersimplicity, flipping up the antenna turns the device on.
What You Need to Know
The Palm VII is available only in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, though you can get connected at 260 urban locations across the country. The device will go on sale in the rest of the United States later this year, according to 3Com. The rollout is limited because the company wants to make sure they know what they're doing before getting deluged with customers. This is 3Com's first foray into the ISP and subscription service businesses, and they want to avoid a reputation for unresponsiveness.
Signing up for the connectivity services is remarkably easy. Unlike cell phones, pagers and other wireless devices, which require a company to activate the service for you, the Palm VII lets you activate the service yourself by simply following a step-by-step wizard-like process that takes about 10 minutes.
You cannot use the wireless connection to synchronize your Palm VII with a desktop computer. That's done with a cradle (included) that's physically connected to your PC.
The Palm VII uses two AAA batteries like all the other Palms except the Palm V, which has a fixed, rechargeable battery. To cope with the additional power requirements of wireless connectivity, the Palm VII also has a nickel-metal hydride battery for the transmitter that is actually recharged by the AAA batteries.
The Palm V's rechargeable solution is superior to the battery-swapping gymnastics required by the use of AAA batteries, something that's unfriendly both to the environment and to your wallet. With about half the battery life of the Palm III, the Palm VII should have been designed with a rechargeable battery.
The documentation is very good. It's simple yet thorough, unlike some manuals that make documentation simple by not telling you anything.
Thoug
