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Palm VII Puts Web in Your Hand

This handheld lets you make trades, shop, and check flights.

By Tom Spring, PCWorld   

Complete Coverage

Palm Palm VII

The $599 Palm VII is Palm Computing's first wireless device that offers limited access to the Internet, e-mail, and special e-commerce functions. On Monday, Palm Computing showcases the Palm VII at the Rainbow Room in New York and will announce "eleventh hour" partners promoting Palm VII applications and services.

Late-Breaking Palm Partners

Fidelity Investments will offer its customers access to live stock trading using the Palm. United Airlines will permit you to punch in a UA flight number and get up-to-the-minute status reports on departure and arrival times, as well as gate and baggage claim information. Prudential Realty will offer Multiple Listing Services over Palm's wireless service.

"Palm VII is all about giving you access to information and services wherever and whenever you want," says Tammy Medanich, Palm Computing product manager. "Palm VII places the Palm Pilot on the cusp of a wireless revolution."

Palm Pundits

Observers agree that a wireless revolution is afoot, but say that the Palm VII is an unlikely catalyst.

Jupiter Communications predicts that 54.6 million smart handheld devices with Internet access will be in use by 2003. That's up from the 490,000 currently accessing the Net. But analysts predict that the growth of this market segment will be spurred by changes in cellular phone technologies, not by improvements to "personal companions" like the Palm VII, says Seamus McAteer, Jupiter's director of Web technology strategies.

"People have been talking about the mobile data market longer than interactive TV," McAteer says. "I predict the Palm VII will fail exactly where others have failed before ..."

In the mid-90s, Motorola unsuccessfully promoted its Envoy and Marco wireless handheld devices. Motorola says it discontinued both lines in 1997 because of poor sales. Analysts say that Motorola's and other wireless handheld schemes failed early because the technology was immature and didn't have a broad enough appeal to the general public.

Analysts like Diana Hwang, research manager for smart handheld devices at International Data Corporation, wonders whether much has changed.

"Palm VII is a niche device," Hwang says. "It's a first-generation product that will most likely struggle in the marketplace."

Palm Computing's 8-kilobyte-per-second network is too narrow, coverage is too spotty, and the price is too high, McAteer says. Palm Computing's Palm.Net service uses BellSouth's Mobitext wireless network, available in 260 major U.S. cities.

Besides the cost of the hardware, Palm will charge $9 per month for basic Palm.Net service for 50KB of data, or about 150 screens of information. Palm's premium service costs $24.99 per month for 150KB of data. Additional data costs 30 cents per kilobyte.

Is the Future in Your Hands?

Cheap cellular voice and data networks will ignite the market for mobile access to the Internet, say experts.

"Cheap integration of microbrowsers in conventional handheld devices will stealthily grow the market overnight," McAteer says. He maintains today's 74.5 million cellular phone users will take the wireless handheld plunge only when the technology becomes a standard feature in cellular phones.

This summer, Nextel Communications will roll out a new Motorola i1000 as well as a digital cellular phone. Expected to cost less than $300, the device will operate as a cell phone and will include a wireless modem for sending and receiving e-mail. It will connect you to a personal home page that has calendar applications, to-do lists, clipping services, and e-mail. The devices are also expected to have two-way paging capabilities and act as two-way radios.

"The technology community has been enamored with personal companions for years, because they sit around in meetings all day and play with them," McAteer says. "They've got to go out and see what the rest of the world really needs."