Palm Innovation New Product Line Launch 8th October Melbourne

PDA users generally fit into two categories, those that use them religiously to book in every moment of their lives, or those who buy them for their other capabilities. Speaking personally, I’m one of the latter. But you don’t care about that do you? You’d like to know about the new products from Palm.

Nathanael 'Funnelbc' Jeanneret

PDA users generally fit into two categories, those that use them religiously to book in every moment of their lives, or those who buy them for their other capabilities. Speaking personally, I'm one of the latter. But you don't care about that do you? You'd like to know about the new products from Palm.

Palm is unique in that to a channel event (generally channel events are for resellers and computer shop owners and sales folk) they warmly acknowledged the importance of the input of the local Palm users group (PUG) and thanked them for their attendance. While we all know that nerds like to sneak in to events like this and get the inside guff on new gear, it's rather nice to know that Palm encourages and accepts this.

There's quite a bit in the wings for Palm at the moment and the majority of the time spent was talking about the very new, Tungsten T3 PDA. You can check out Palm's site for the T3 here:

http://www.palmone.com/us/products/handhelds/tungsten-t3/


The big selling point for this puppy is the new widescreen - What the website doesn't do justice to, is the actual size of the screen, while the PDA itself is tiny; the 320x480 resolution is the highest in its class. The screen looks positively cinematic after being used to standard PDA screen sizes. It also boasts an ARM XScale 400MHz processor which seems to perform at a similar speed to its nearest Pocket PC based competitors.

The Palm sales folk expounded the value of the CPU declaring it to be “the fastest available in the world for the PDA ever!” I will give a shiny penny to the person that can't spot the hyperbole in that gem. Integrated Bluetooth support seems to work very well in the new model – although if you walk into a room full of Bluetooth devices, as the demo room was, it tended to hang while the machine was polling each Bluetooth device. But only if you bring up the Bluetooth device directory. It seems you can change the default view to “trusted” devices which will save some time when transferring to a known PDA/Phone/System but more often than not, you will be looking for transfers from new acquaintances, so this may be an area Palm need to work on.

Nevertheless, the Bluetooth implementation seems transparent and easy – it seems to be free of the teething issues many other new technologies (yes, Bluetooth isn't exactly new but…) experience when they come to mass production - USB 1.0 and VIA chipsets anyone?

The keypad has been “eergonomisedd” as the American Palm rep somewhat painfully over pronounced several times. All of the new Palm handhelds are to come with cases – and the new products come with a dimpled flip cover which prevent accidentally turning the device on – and the addition of a keylock is a handy one. Anyone with a PDA with a limited battery lifespan (all of us) will appreciate this simple addition.

The new operating system (Palm OS 5.2.1) has a few major improvements, especially within the organization of appointments and to-do (or tasks as they are now called ala Pocket PC) is a little more logical, and reoccurring events and colour coded appointments are available now. It now comes with transparent Excel and Word compatibility – and PowerPoint via on the fly conversion. But we all know PowerPoint is naff don't we? Well it is.

Palm's also added an onscreen shortcut bar on the main screen called excitingly enough – the status bar, which includes one touch access to the screen rotation, Bluetooth, clock/battery, search and a few other common tools. A handy addition to the new operating system.

Despite some very disparaging remarks made by the Palm folks about the stability of Pocket PC based handhelds, it isn't an easy choice of for the perspective PDA purchaser. I'm very happy with my slightly older PDA and while I saw a lot of nice features, I didn't see any very compelling reasons to reach for my back pocket and lay cash on the table for an upgrade. At least not in the current range – even with that lovely widescreen display.

Which in a roundabout way brings me around to other big news of the night, which wasn't a secret at all – the upcoming merger of Palm and Handspring. This is to occur (all things going well) on October 28 this year. Once this happens, Palm will be using the Handspring Treo as the basis for their future “communicator” model PDA's. Finally! Soon, we should have a decent sized PDA/phone combos. Not all of us want to put a silver housebrick up to our ears.

On the software front, Palm has licensed IBM's WebSphere Micro Environment (J2ME Java Powered Runtime (was that as fun to read as it was to write?) and soon we should see Java running directly on Tungsten+ class handhelds. That's going to add an awful lot of clout for Palm in terms of the pool of available talent and software available for that platform and allow much more accessible development for the Palm.

Exciting times ahead for Palm – or Pa1mOne as they will be called come October 28th. Yes they'll be changing their name to signify the merger and the new Palm branding. It seems leet speak may become the new Ebonics of the 21st century! w00t!


Nathanael 'Funnelbc' Jeanneret