The prospect of freebies is a draw at any trade show, and it appeared to the untrained eye that Palm might be giving away the best freebie of all: actual Palm handhelds. In actuality, the company was handing out the PaperPalm, a notebook that resembles a handheld but is in fact just a clever-looking spiral-bound pad of paper. What appears to be the stylus is actually a golf pencil. On the plus side, the batteries never run out and there is no reset button. And it shows that although prices for Palm handhelds have indeed fallen in the past year, the company is not, in fact, giving them away. Bagging the laptop
My goal was to report entirely from PalmSource using the recently introduced i705 wireless handheld. Though it's a fine product, there were a couple of hitches. My first unit died after a few hours, making me leery of leaving my laptop at the office -- in case I needed it as a backup. Unfortunately, to get corporate email on the device, users need to have their PC on at the office, behind the firewall, redirecting the email. Of course, since I had my office PC with me, this was impossible. But such problems won't arise after Palm releases its server-based software this summer. Still, using the i705 meant that the laptop spent most of its time in my bag. I went online several times with the device, got a couple Web-based emails from editors and even a surprise AOL instant message from an old friend. This column was also written and filed using the i705, along with a combination of Palm's thumb keyboard and its fold-out keyboard.
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