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Palm III | ||
Palm III |
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By the time this comes out, the first Palm III systems should be available in the UK. The changes aren't big ones, but then the Pilot and PalmPilot were so good that big changes aren't required. The quick summary is that the size is unchanged, memory has been increased to 2 Mb, there is a new stylus, a flip up cover, and it now has IrDA support. There are a few other minor differences, like the two extra fonts, better sound, four grey scale support is now official instead of undocumented, and the new Desktop program includes the ability to link a file on the desktop PC filing system to either the address book or memos. All current third party programs and conduits should still work. The UK price is 299 GBP, and an upgrade board for any prior Pilot model will cost $149 (in the USA; the UK price hasn't been set as I am writing). This upgrade includes the IrDA support. The current Professional and Personal models will be reduced in price. As you can gather from my comments about the SuperPilot, I think that 2 Mb of RAM will be enough for almost everyone, although I am extremely disappointed that the memory board slot has been deleted from the specification. Another missed opportunity is that the IrDA support doesn't support HotSync, although this is hard enough to get working for other PDAs that I can't say I am surprised. What is still unknown is how well Palm III will compare with the Windows CE 3.0 PalmPC machines. Given how poorly thought out the CE interface is, I can't see any discerning user preferring PalmPC (Microsoft's contentiously similar name for their Pilot equivalent machines); but then sales of CE 1.0 machines have shown that a lot of people buy on name and features, not on usability or functionality. Palm III should be both smaller and cheaper, and I am convinced that size is the key factor in the PDA market, as the success of Palm to date has shown. |
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