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CART.,Slim Leather Carrying Case, 3Com, PalmVII

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The new 3Com Palm VII connected organizer is just about everything you'd want in a pocket computer: It's useful, easy to operate and wirelessly connected. But the price of the connectivity is far beyond what most road warriors would be willing to pay.

The Palm VII is essentially a Palm III with wireless connectivity built in. While there are plenty of wireless solutions for palm-sized computers, the Palm VII's is by far the most elegant and the easiest to set up and use.

This latest version of the Palm is not the most advanced 3Com device in all respects. It offers neither the Palm IIIx's superior operating system and memory, nor the Palm V's stylish svelteness and rechargeable battery. The battery life is half that of the Palm III-the Palm VII will runs through two AAA batteries in about two or three weeks. It's also significantly bigger and heavier -- and in my opinion, uglier -- than any other Palm, making it too big for some shirt pockets, despite 3Com's ad pitch. For comparison, it's about twice as thick as the Palm V, and about 3/4 of an inch longer. And it doesn't come with a protective screen as do the Palm III and IIIx models.

Then there's the price, the highest in the Palm family. The unit itself costs $599, but there's an ongoing charge for the wireless service. Monthly service is $9.99 at a minimum, but more realistically you'll spend several times that given the limited access the basic plan allows and the steeply incremental costs of exceeding the limit. So if you're looking for a bargain, keep looking.

But if you can put up with these shortcomings, you get the ability to pay bills and transfer funds from a taxi cab, trade stocks during a boring meeting, and send and receive e-mail from almost anywhere.

The new Palm comes with access to 22 mostly impressive and free third-party wireless-content providers, including ABCNEWS.com, Bank of America, MovieFone, UPS and so on. Most of these services require the easy installation of a custom application; some are already installed. 3Com promises that many more content providers will come online over the next year.

Getting Connected
The Palm VII connects via radio waves to the BellSouth Wireless Data network, which covers most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. However, Montana, Wyoming, Hawaii and Alaska aren't covered at all, and other states have coverage in just one or two cities.

The cost of connectivity is by far the biggest "gotcha" of the Palm VII. The two basic option plans are $9.99 per month for basic and $24.99 for extended service, plus a $19.99 setup fee for each. The basic plan limits you to 50KB (that's right: kilobytes!) of data, while the extended plan covers 150KB per month. That's about 150 screenfulls and 450 screenfulls of information per month, respectively. If you exceed either limit, they'll charge you 30 cents for each additional kilobyte. That's a dime for every screenfull of information.

Just to give you an idea of how hard it would be to stick to the basic plan, that would cover only 30 e-mail messages, 20 stock quotes, 10 sports scores, 10 traffic reports and 10 weather reports per month. (This sample usage comes from the Palm VII wireless service plan documentation.) That works out to about one e-mail message per day, one or two stock quotes every other day, and one sports score, one traffic report and one weather report every three days. For $24.99 ($300 per year) you get three times that-roughly three e-mail messages a day, about three stock quotes each day, and so on.

Mercifully, the iMessenger e-mail application receives only the first two screens of any long e-mail message (20 cents worth). If you want to get the rest of the message, you can click on a couple of buttons and download it.

These service plans are practical if you want to receive only one or a few e-mails a day, and rarely connect to take advantage of the other great applications and services being offered. But for normal use - which would include sending and receiving dozens of e-mail messages per day and accessing some of the other services at least 10 times per day - expect to pay hundreds of dollars per month in service fees.

Getting slapped with bills like this won't faze Wall Street firms for whom up-to-the-second stock information is everything and money is no object. But 3Com must rethink this unrealistic pricing plan if it expects the device to be a hit with business travelers, salespeople or consumers. Accessing information wirelessly can be very slow going, taking anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds for every tap of the pen. The ABCnews.com service, for example, is hierarchical, and requires drilling down three or four layers to get to a story. Each layer requires a wait of between 10 and 15 seconds. The Wall Street Journal site required waits of up to 30 seconds per tap. Searching services such as the bundled US West DEX Yellow pages took about 10 seconds, which feels slow for a search. The sluggish access is partly a limitation of the BellSouth network, which tops out at about 9.6 kilobits per second. Performance may decrease further as more users come online. But having said all that, I was extremely impressed with the performance of the iMessenger e-mail application and service. I was consistently able to receive messages in my desktop inbox just 10 seconds after sending them from the Palm device, and vice versa. Incidentally, 3Com is your ISP for the Palm VII. You can't use another ISP, nor can you use 3Com as your ISP for your PC or any other wireless computer. In addition, you can't use your existing e-mail address to send and receive messages on the Palm VII, though of course you can set up an agent on your desktop to forward mail to the device. When you sign up for the service, Palm assigns you with a unique @palm.net address.

The Palm VII is particularly well suited for online banking, shopping and other e-commerce tasks. 3Com has done an admirable job of building in solid security features that assure private transactions, including Secure Sockets Layer support, bullet-proof encryption, message integrity checking and BellSouth network authentication. All packets travel through palm.net servers, ensuring only trusted data gets to your Palm. Wireless access to content and services helps mitigate the claustrophobic 2MB memory/storage maximum for the Palm VII. Instead of installing a dictionary, for example, you can use the bundled Merriam-Webster applet to look up words from a database so big it could never fit on any Palm device.

Until some software company creates the means to do so, you cannot browse the web using a Palm VII. Instead, the device uses "Web Clipping," a proprietary means of getting information by which content providers reformat real web content specifically for the Palm VII. The process strips out all the graphics and other bloated and extraneous stuff, and delivers content formatted for the Palm VII's low-bandwidth communications and tiny monochrome screen.

The Palm VII does not replace a pager, as it does not support notification. That would require that the device be always on, drastically shortening battery life. If you have e-mail waiting or incoming stock information, you must turn the Palm on and check for it. In keeping with the Palm philosophy of hypersimplicity, flipping up the antenna turns the device on.

What You Need to Know
The Palm VII is available only in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, though you can get connected at 260 urban locations across the country. The device will go on sale in the rest of the United States later this year, according to 3Com. The rollout is limited because the company wants to make sure they know what they're doing before getting deluged with customers. This is 3Com's first foray into the ISP and subscription service businesses, and they want to avoid a reputation for unresponsiveness.

Signing up for the connectivity services is remarkably easy. Unlike cell phones, pagers and other wireless devices, which require a company to activate the service for you, the Palm VII lets you activate the service yourself by simply following a step-by-step wizard-like process that takes about 10 minutes.

You cannot use the wireless connection to synchronize your Palm VII with a desktop computer. That's done with a cradle (included) that's physically connected to your PC.

The Palm VII uses two AAA batteries like all the other Palms except the Palm V, which has a fixed, rechargeable battery. To cope with the additional power requirements of wireless connectivity, the Palm VII also has a nickel-metal hydride battery for the transmitter that is actually recharged by the AAA batteries.

The Palm V's rechargeable solution is superior to the battery-swapping gymnastics required by the use of AAA batteries, something that's unfriendly both to the environment and to your wallet. With about half the battery life of the Palm III, the Palm VII should have been designed with a rechargeable battery.

The documentation is very good. It's simple yet thorough, unlike some manuals that make documentation simple by not telling you anything.

Though I didn't test them all, 3Com says any application that runs on a Palm III will run on a Palm VII.

The Bottom Line.
3Com should upgrade the operating system to the latest PalmOS version, bump the RAM up to at least 4MB, build in a rechargeable battery and reduce the size and weight of the device. And Palm must find a way to boost the performance of online queries.

But these are relatively minor quibbles about a generally excellent and supremely usable product. The showstopper is the price of connectivity--and that's why we do not recommend the Palm VII.

If you are looking for more affordable wireless access in a Palm-sized device, explore one of the many options available for the Palm III, Palm IIIx and Windows CE PPCs, or consider one of the smart pagers with PIM functionality. By the end of the year, you'll also be able to buy one of several smart phones, also with PIM features, that may rival the Palm VII in features and ease of use, but cost far less to use.

Another option is simply to wait until 3Com upgrades the Palm VII and downgrades the price. -- From Winmag®

We have seen the future, and it ain't cheap. Make no bones about it, the Palm VII is an info-freak and gadget-geek's dream. At heart, it's a Palm IIIx - sharing the Palm's new, sharper LCD screen, nonupgradable 2MB of RAM, and other handheld perks. It's bigger and heavier than earlier Palms, a half-inch taller and nearly an ounce heavier than a III, and it completely lacks the ultrathin design of the futuristic-looking Palm V.

The added girth comes from the VII's unique, built-in wireless modem. Using special Web-clipping applications called PQAs, freely downloadable from 3Com's Palm VII site (http://www.palm.net), the VII scoops compact packages of information from the Internet. PQAs include dozens of favorites like CNN, MapQuest, and e-Trade, and local movie schedules are just a few taps away (see "Pick Me Up at VII," below). But while you can review earlier downloaded information, PQAs don't remember your input - you'll have to scrawl passwords or zip codes each time.

Wireless email on the VII is as easy as email on your Mac. You use the included iMessenger for the proprietary Palm.net mail or third-party applications for your usual POP or IMAP accounts. You can view Web pages that lack a PQA via a third-party browser, though you won't get the graphics, tables, and frames. On the downside, while wireless access is available in about 260 metropolitan areas, huge swaths of the country remain inaccessible.

The real expense isn't the VII's $499 price tag - it's the wireless fees. For $10 a month, you get 50K of info - this comes out to a daily allotment of roughly one email message and a couple of reports. $25 a month buys three times that, but hard-core info junkies must shell out $40 a month for 300K, nearly equaling the cost of the Palm VII itself in a year. If you're iMac only, you'll also need to buy the $39.95 PalmConnect USB Kit.

If you're an info junkie needing up-to-the-second information in places wired modems don't reach, the Palm VII is for you. The rest of us will pick up a Palm modem and stick close to phone lines. -- Joseph O. Holmes

good news : Typical Palm ease of use. Dozens of free clipping apps. Thousands of standard Palm apps.

bad news : Expensive wireless service. Bigger and heavier than earlier Palms. Wireless service unavailable in many areas. PQAs don't remember input.

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