Palm VII

Palm VII

You should have read of the new Palm VII product from 3com in the Horizon section of the last issue of PC Pro. I was present at the announcement, and had the opportunity to talk to developers and Palm representatives about the product, as well as getting live experience of using it.

The Palm VII is a wireless communications expansion of the existing Palm III. The wireless functionality is well integrated, so flipping up the aerial will switch on the Palm, just as pressing the Memo button will. The software is almost identical, on the surface, to the Palm III, with two additions: the iMessenger application, which is a simple email application, and the new Palm.Net tab in the Application launcher. This tab contains applications provided by Palm (and the content providers), and is a highly targeted version of a web browser for each content provider. The intention is to be able to access web sites for valuable information; this interface will normally be driven by an html form resident on the Palm, and will connect to the Internet only to retrieve the requested data; Palm call this process web clipping. It certainly isn't a general purpose web browser, although any competent Palm C++ programmer could write a standard browser in a couple of minutes using the APIs provided.

As the Palm resident applications are written using more-or-less standard html (with just a few custom tags), and no more than minimal customisation of an Internet site will be required to fully optimise the site for display on a Palm VII, it should be easy for information providers to sign up with Palm. All calls are routed through a special proxy server run by Palm, which is responsible for content filtering; in practice, network latency and loading means that a response may come in as short a time as 5 seconds, or may take 10 - 20 seconds on slightly loaded network (which is what I was experiencing in my tests).

There's just one big catch about the Palm VII: it can only possibly work in the USA, and is dependent upon wireless networks that are only available over there. However, in principle the software should all be able to work over GSM links from an updated Palm III without all the wireless hardware, if Palm were to release it. The disadvantage to Palm of a GSM version would be, at the moment, that it would require considerably more skills to use without their special preconfigured installation for the BellSouth networks.

While attending the Palm Developer Conference, one small point made by Guy Kawasaki in his talk gave me pause. He said, to a rather frosty reception, that email without a keyboard just wasn't an option. For the typical prolix, RSI suffering, mailing list subscribing high volume email user that may seem self-evident. However, I regularly use email applications on all PDAs, and even when I have a choice, as with the Newton 2100, I choose to carry a lighter bundle without an add-on keyboard, rather than take the extra weight and volume of baggage.

This works because I use handheld email more like Post-It notes than florally scented missives. My usual routine is to use a PDA to give rapid, brief responses to urgent emails, and reply at length later on. This is analogous to using a voice recorder rather than a notepad; it serves a similar purpose, but you use the two very differently.

Web clipping is an analogous use of the web. From a desktop machine I browse sites at leisure; sometimes I get very impatient with the delays of waiting for decorative images, and would rather skip to just the data that I am looking for; I even have some desktop programs that do targeted retrieval of data from search engines. There are times that I would kill for that ability, which is exactly what the Palm VII offers. From a conference hall in Santa Clara I was able to check a detailed map of the PC Pro office location, and locate the closest ATMs to the office; the content is already international even if the data provisions are not.

To look at the Palm VII as a US-centric Internet machine would be a mistake. What Palm have developed is of more utility than that.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: March 30, 1999