Here's a Palm for Your Parents

The new Palm m100 offers a cheaper, colorful personal digital assistant that even your folks could use.

Scheduled to be available later in August priced at $149, the Palm m100 features a new design with a rounder shape and removable faceplates that come in colors such as "blue mist" and "ruby pearl." A hinged flip cover and a durable display make the device rugged, while an alarm clock and a scribble notepad replace business tools such as expense tracking and e-mail.

With a new design and tools focused on ease of use, the m100 has the home user in mind. The question is whether home users really want a Palm. Palms have been hugely successful with business people, but it's still undetermined whether the rest of us will use fancy digital organizers. For PC World's complete review, see "Palm's Pocket Organizer for the Rest of Us."

'Oops' Protection Added

For Walkman-like sturdiness, the m100 replaces the glass digitizer--the part of the display that responds to touch--with a plastic one, says Claudia Romanini, director of market and development services for Palm's consumer markets group. "The digitizer is usually what breaks on a Palm."

The fragile flip cover used on Palm IIIs is replaced with one that flips all the way back and houses the stylus, Romanini says.

The m100 comes with a gray faceplate, but you can purchase other colors for $19.95 each. A new clock application has a travel alarm and lets you view the time even when the Palm is off, through a glass window on the flip cover.

One of the ways to enter text into a Palm is to use a Palm-recognizable shorthand called Graffiti. Even Palm-experienced business users can find Graffiti tricky and tedious. The Palm m100 adds a touchscreen notepad application so that you can scribble a phone number without fumbling with Graffiti or a keypad.

Also bundled with the m100 is AvantGo, a browser service for getting synchronized Web content onto your Palm, and Palm Desktop software for the Macintosh. Instead of a HotSync cradle, the m100 comes with a HotSync cable. The cradle is a $29.95 accessory.