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It took me a while to find this, but here is where you can look up coverage by zip code or city name. The closest dot on the map to me is some 50 miles away, but the lookup said that my city was covered with excellent signal reception.

I used a CDPD modem with my PalmV for a little while, and while it was neat, there was a small problem with the modem's form factor. If you were less than gentle while you were using it, the modem would shift a little bit and easily get disconnected from the palm and disconnected from the network. Then you would typically have to power cycle the unit and wait for it to handshake with the network. Kind of a pain just to read email.

The new palm mentioned in this article uses the Mobitex network. This is an 'always on' radio network that is also used by the very popular Blackberry devices by Research in Motion. Mobitex coverage in the US looks pretty good, and there's even Mobitex networks in other countries throughout the world.

Unlike the the RIM 950, Blackberry and palm 7 that use the 8kb Mobitex/RAM (BSWD) you can get a RIM 850 that uses the ARDIS (DataTAC) network. Altough the battery life isn't as good, the towers are in the center of the "cells" rather than the edges and its slower speed option (4.8kb or 19.2kb) and 25kHz vs 12.5kHz channel spacing gives it better in building coverage for any given tower. (but more towers do win and BSWD is building faster) But the main reasion you want it is because reads your IMAP folders directly and even stores messages you typed on the pager in your IMAP Sent folder!! none of that blackbarry M$-exchange redirectors. And an unlimited airtime plan..

I got one of these about 2 or 3 months ago, and it is the ideal accessory for Webheads on the go. I wanted it because I do most of my work on client sites, and I need a means to get to my e-mail when I am enroute to a client or in-between two offices.

BellSouth Wireless Data provides service in the United States. Cantel provides service in Canada. Service is quite good in large cities and along major highways. YMMV, but it works in about 90% of the metropolitan areas in the USA.

You can get service for US$24.95 per month and up. The only thing I think most people will find upsetting is that service is metered unless you want to pay around $100 per month.

I use it for wireless e-mail, but it can also be used for some sort of wireless Internet access. I think the provider of that service is GoAmerica.

FWIW, I looked at the market and decided that the Blackberry pager was more practical than the Palm VII, and then I took the plunge. It would be a cool gift, but it is definitely for the CEO type or the geek who has everything.

--

Dave Aiello

As I understand it, the network behind Palm.Net is Bell South Wireless Data, which was originally a company called "RAM". The technology is called "Mobitex" and is a low-speed FM radio packet network. I know a bit about the network, having worked on a laptop-based wireless messaging service that used it.

The IP issue
The network itself is not IP-based, and I doubt that Palm would implement full TCP/IP on top of it- specifically, I don't think TCP would be feasible, and it wouldn't make sense to add the overhead of an additional packet protocol on top of the base network. Palm has probably implemented proxy servers that communicate with specially-designed websites and compress and transmit the web data back to your palm using a protocol that is most likely largely proprietary. The transmission protocol between a wireless application server and the actual network was X.25 back when I was working with it, but I bet they've moved to Frame Relay or some sort of stream wrapped in IP by now. So it's unlikely that any of the existing Palm TCP/IP apps will work with this service (based on what I know of the network).

Coverage
Although Bell South is regional, the network is nationwide in the US, and has pretty amazing coverage. RAM used to compete with a similar network run by Motorola- RAM generally had the higher data trasmission rates, Motorola better in-building coverage. Folks outside the US are out of luck- I don't think Mobitex is an international standard.

Performance
The network is designed to transmit fairly large packets, and has high latency. In-building coverage can be a real problem- when I was using RAM to get my e-mail on the road, I generally had to be near a window for it to work well. It was also somewhat spotty when moving (like in a car). It's been a couple of years since I really used the network, so they may have improved things, but there are very good reasons why Palm has implemented this as a "web clippings" service and not as a full-on browser.

When it's doing its thing, it's awesome. I've had some problems with the net-bound mail taking anywhere up to 1/2 an hour to leave their network but unit to unit communication is almost instant.

Bellsouth support is also kind of spotty -- the "A" key on mine sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and I've sent BS a couple of emails asking if they'll replace it. Nada responses.

The Blackberry looks interesting but it only works with Exchange. How about one that works with Linux?!

Say 'hi' to Thahn (sp?)!

I grew very irritated when you couldn't use them for two-way communication

I grew very irritated when you couldn't use them for two-way communication