Cloning Palms

By Josh Quittner

My latest personal technology triumph is the Slinger, which I bought at sitstay.com for $34.95. This overgrown slingshot fires tennis balls 150 ft. up a hill in my backyard--the perfect distance for my young brown hound Otto, who is an utter maniac for retrieving stuff. The Slinger is nearly perfect in every respect. It even has what I think of as a "wife feature": it lets my spouse scoop slimy, post-retrieved balls into a built-in wire rack without having to sully her ivory hands.

I mention the Slinger as an example of personal technology that I actually purchased. I review a ton of stuff, some of it favorably. But only rarely do I find something I like enough to buy. The last one was the Palm Vx. I was so smitten by the slender but powerful handheld that I went out and bought one. But now every time a newer model comes out, I ask myself, Is it time to upgrade?

I asked that question again, shrilly, when I saw the latest offerings from Palm, Handspring and Sony. All three run Palm's outstanding operating system; all three are feature packed. The one that tempted me most was the Sony Clie, but let's look first at the other two.

The Handspring Edge ($399), while nearly as small as the Vx, felt cheap. The stylus clips to the side in a way that seems vulnerable; it should be stored inside, where God intended your stylus to be. Harder to dismiss is the long-awaited m505 ($449) from Palm. Unlike my increasingly wimpy Vx, this baby offers a full-color display. But when I downloaded a few older color applications from the Net, they wouldn't run on the m505; apparently, its new operating system, Palm OS 4, didn't recognize them. Major points off for that.

The m505 also features something new--at least for Palm: expansion cards that fit into a tiny slot. You can add memory, storage or prepackaged programs such as travel guides. Palm hopes to compete against Handspring by offering clip-on gadgets like cameras and phones. But come on, Palmies! Do I need another incompatible storage medium? I already have SmartDisks, CompactFlash disks, SanDisks and Memory Sticks coming out of my ears, not to mention floppies, CDs and DVDs. Now I'm supposed to embrace Secure Digital disks and MultimediaCards? I think not.

Speaking of Memory Sticks, that's the storage format the Sony Clie ($499) uses--not surprising, since Sony invented it. The Clie PEG-N710C (great name!) is an upgrade of last year's feeble foray into the Palm clone market. There are two remarkable things about it. The first is its brilliant color screen, which makes the Palm m505's look putrid. The second is the built-in music player. This is the first Palm clone to feature a headphone jack and the ability to play MP3s--no simple trick, since the 33 MHz processor that powers these PDAs is too weak to drive MP3 music files. Sony created a neat hack: it added a digital-signal processing chip that bypasses the operating system. You'll need to shell out $150 more for a 64 MB memory stick, though--the 8 MB stick included with the unit holds three songs max. And if you want a wireless modem, you'll have to wait until the end of the year.

So am I buying a Clie? Not yet. My Vx still works fine.

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