Palm VII
The very latest model from Palm Computing, the Palm VII, a combination of the Palm line with wireless technology, has been a long time coming, and has been eagerly anticipated. It is only available in a small area of the USA, and the current implementation could only possibly work in the USA, yet is a sufficiently intriguing technical platform to be of great interest to PC Pro readers. By coincidence, I have had to spend a lot of my time recently working in the area where the Palm VII is available.
Announced in December 98 at the Palm developer conference, to be launched in the second half of 99 for under $1,000, the Palm VII has met the initial delivery promise, although the implementation of that delivery will not satisfy all potential users. It was launched in June, exclusively in the New York area, but with wireless coverage across the entire United States.
Palm wanted to have complete control over the service, so that signup and operation is under their exclusive control: this dictated that they went with a single wireless provider, Bell South. Their service covers 260 metropolitan centres in the USA; this means that some states (Montana and Wyoming) have no coverage at all, whereas others have good coverage. Certainly I found 100% signal strength throughout Manhattan and New York City. Coverage maps are available on the Palm website (at www.palm.net) for the entire USA; in some outlying areas coverage may only work outside. Certainly in an underground auditorium in Manhattan, despite the excellent outdoors and above ground service, I couldn't make a connection. Sometimes, despite good signal strength, a connection couldn't be made with the network (just like mobile phones in the City of London).
A check of the maps shows what appears to be good coverage in the big cities, and nothing in rural districts. New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles and the entire San Francisco Bay Area all have excellent coverage on the maps. Checking out minor areas shows the maps looking good, although I am unable to bear out coverage in fringe areas. The map for Arizona, for instance, shows a continuous stretch of coverage from Phoenix in the middle of the state, along the freeway down to Tucson, and stretching out partway from Tucson to Tombstone in the far south east of the state, which is pretty impressive if true.
Network speed and latency might become an issue: transmission speed is about equivalent to 9,600 bps, but a simple query shows a round trip time of between 4 and 15 seconds in good conditions.
It costs $599 plus state sales tax to buy a Palm VII, but you also need to subscribe to Palm's wireless service. There are two different plans; both cost $19.99 for a one-off sign up fee, although this is being waived until the end of August 1999. The lesser plan costs $9.99 per month for up to 50 K of messages. As all transmissions are compressed and stripped, this isn't too bad - it took me three days to use this up, with heavy use, but might last a light user the whole month. I certainly found, when tidying up my system, that I had about 40 normal email messages in around 40K of space. Palm claim that this should represent about 150 full screens of data. The alternative plan costs $24.99 for 150 K of data; both plans charge 0.30c per k of data once the bar has been passed. For a heavy user this isn't enough, and normal usage can become very expensive.
Externally, the Palm VII looks like a slightly elongated Palm III, rather than the more stylish Palm V. The extra length contains a LiIon rechargable battery that powers the transmitter, and provides most of the complaints (and excitement) about using the VII. It also has a flip up, floppy plastic aerial, that acts as an additional power on switch and application button. Weight is slightly more than a Palm IIIx. It doesn't have any flip cover, unlike the III, and comes with a case that is considerably more obviously plastic than previous cases.
Internally, it couldn't be more different. The entire hardware has been reengineered to fit a normal Palm and a wireless radio into the same space as any other Palm. It is actually more like the Palm V in many respects than the visually more closely related Palm IIIx. There is no internal slot for memory expansion beyond the built-in 2 megabytes (although this is hardly essential for any Palm user), and the rechargeable transmitter battery is not user replaceable, implying that the Palm VII should be discarded when the battery dies. This battery has a curious impact on the behaviour of the system. It provides power to the main circuits when the 2 main AAA batteries are removed, meaning that you can retain memory for much longer than normal should the batteries become drained - which is far more likely with a Palm VII, for reasons that I shall explain shortly. It, of course, also means that a full hardware reset can take a very long time to perform, if you rely on a drained battery. The additional drain of recharging the transmitter battery can empty the main batteries unexpectedly, and you are unable to use the transmitter while this recharging is taking place. Both of these effects are extremely inconvenient.
Like the Palm IIIx, IIIe and V, the Palm VII benefits from faster memory access and a much better screen than older models.
For the most part, the software inside the Palm VII is identical to that supplied with the Palm III and V. There is a new category in the Application display, called "Palm.net". This is used to hold all of the web applications, and is automatically entered when the aerial is flipped up.
Palm.net applications
The three new applications are: iMessenger, Activate and Diagnostics. Active is used to make your initial connection to the service, which can only be made at least one hour after inserting your batteries, to allow for the transmitter battery to fully charge. This leads you through entering the details required to connect to the service, and immediately upon completion the system is fully usable. The current application is 100% USA-centric, and will only allow US addresses and phone numbers to be entered. Naturally, it will accepts credit cards of any nationality. Part of the process involves you giving several alternate userids, and your own choice of password; the application will suggest two different ids derived from your name, and these suggestions are reasonable.
Diagnostics checks the signal strength of the network, and provides details about the local transmitter that you are connected to, and the internal operation of the service. It also gives precise voltage levels for the main and transmitter batteries, and an indicator that the transmitter battery is due to be recharged that day or next. I have never seen the scheduled recharge indicator active, but a couple of times have been unable to use the service due to a surprise recharge.
iMessenger is the main messaging application. It doesn't interoperate at all with Mail, which is extremely inconvenient. It provides a category selector for Inbox, Outbox, Deleted, Filed and Draft, but you have no way to create custom categories (unlike any other Palm application). It also doesn't provide for cc addresses, but does permit both a reply-to address and an (optional) signature. However, if you access the palm.net web site, they provide an option to set a bcc address for all of your outgoing email. You can also access your billing details, change the account password (which is only used to access the web site), and clear out your mailbox. Old messages will also be automatically deleted after a period.
A number of PQAs (Palm Query Applications) are preinstalled on the Palm VII, a few more are available on the supplied CD, and more are available for download from the palm.net web site. Most PQAs are very small, around 1K, although a few are considerably larger; I currently have 35 installed, and passed up on quite a few that I didn't like the sound of. Several of these provide headline news from different services: ABCNews, BBC, ESPN.com, pdaDASH, Slashdot, USA Today and wsj.com, but most are reference applications of different degrees of utility. There are a couple of ATM locators, a map application that can give full directions from place to place, something to locate your nearest branch of Starbucks, and others. I found the OAG PQA very useful to check flight schedules - and saved a colleague about seven hours hanging around at LaGuardia as a result. The obligatory UPS parcel trace, hotel guides, people locators, ZIP code lookup and Yellow Pages are all present. In all cases the initial screen comes up without any network activity, and all links that will cause the network to be activated contain a little icon to indicate that fact; secure connections have another, similar icon. Where possible, reference data required to formulate a proper query is available built-in to the PQA so that it doesn't require network access.
find the quickest way back home
All PQAs share a common interface: web derived buttons, a back button, a history pop-up and underlined links are all present, and show the underlying web technology used in PQAs. These aren't always well implemented; there doesn't seem to be any way to recover a previously submitted form, for instance; I'd probably prefer to see all PQAs load with whatever was the last contents of their forms already entered, although the history list does provide a way to jump back among results pages. Some special data entry fields are available that are unique to PQAs: a date picker, time picker and both a unique machine id, and the id of the nearest transmitter.
Compression on transmission is automatic; you can check the amount that was received from the Palm.net servers by tapping on the title bar for a count of bytes transmitted. The Palm.net servers take special measures to strip down all pages that aren't identified as "PalmComputingPlatform" in a META tag; they will strip out all images, and truncate after 1,000 bytes. This applies both to pages inside PQAs as well as those retrieved from the net.
Creating your own PQAs is easy. Palm provide a Query Application Builder program that will take a set of html (and other) files, and create a PQA from them that can be loaded into your Palm VII. I created a custom PQA that lets you retrieve any web page, provided that palm.net will let it through. Development time was under an hour, and involved several html pages, plus a cgi script that I installed on a convenient server.
... looks like this in IE
and is turned into a pqa
...like this
to deliver this result - your own web browser for Palm VII
Overall, I like the Palm VII and will continue to use it. PQAs aren't as powerful as I would like, with restricted html support than is really begging for a faster network and colour screens. The increased size and weight isn't a problem in practice, but the bizarre behaviour of the charging system managed to annoy me a number of times and really must be corrected by Palm. Critics of the Palm V will also hate the non-upgradeable nature of the VII and the non-replaceable transmitter battery. But that is a minor issue: the strict dependency on a single, USA only network means that it can't be sold internationally without modification, which makes a mockery of the personal and mobile nature of a PDA - but not really any worse than the similar situation with regard to mobile phones. And, like mobile phones, the expense and lack of flexibility in the charging model is a real killer for any other than the "comfortably off".
Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: September 15, 1999