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I'm quite interested in these Palm statistics. My high school a few years ago implemented what we called the Palm Project. They offered incentives to students and teachers who used them in classes. There was a contest for students to program the best educational application for Palm (the prize was PALM stock). I used it for two things:
1) To take notes in history class
and
2) for my math class which required this application we were beta testing called FrontRow developed by some Harvard computer scientists. (And I know that class grades went down because of using the app - nobody except two people could figure out how to submit homework for the first two weeks!)

The Palm project ended up as a miserable failure. After that and another year of mandated Palm posession (by the way, most people bought Palms and left them in their boxes), the school's IT Director declared that they were no longer required. No teacher used them and maybe three students in the whole Upper School of 400 would ever be seen with one on any given day. (One of those had a Pocket PC instead.)

Now, that was all four years ago. The school doesn't want people to know about its failed endeavor. A quick Google search for "fcds palm project" (without the quotes, of course) turns up little of interest, except this one press release.

If this Kansas school district can make it work, I'd be interested in following it. Textbooks, besides Project Gutenberg ones, weren't really available for Palm, and even Gutenberg textbooks needed an 3rd party app to read them well. Again, we were using IIIcs, which were outdated when we got them.

To bring this back closer to topic, I think a $100 laptop would do a whole lot more good to students (I know my $700 laptop was amazing for me in high school!) and would probably be cheaper than handhelds.

We're both wrong.

The 300's screen isn't 320x320, it's 320x240.

However, it's still a far cry from the 600's 160x160. The advantage the 600 has is that it's screen is active matrix vs the 300's passive matrix screen, which makes the 600's screen a bit brighter.

I found this article which might be of interest to you.

... Blue Dock, a PDA docking station that allows a PDA to function as a primary computing platform in a desktop environment, without the need for an additional workstation or laptop.

I used a Palm V, a collapsing keyboard, a lame sprint cell phone and an annoyingly long pda-phone cable as my primary "system" for about nine months back in, um, 1999? 2000? I was traveling a lot, working as a freelance journalist, and it was a perfectly acceptable solution. Except for the smallness of the screen text.

Slow transfer speeds, web pages broken by minimalist small screen browsers, truly limited functionality, even the two bit color--I became accustomed to all of that, along with my slowly worsening eyesight. Small PDA text is really brutal over a long period. Unless you can find a way to expand the screen (even if it just mirrors the cramped pda screen display), using a pda instead of a computer is not a long-term solution if you care about your vision.

Then again, if she really just sends a handful of brief emails a week, and doesn't do anything extensive online, she might be perfectly happy with a hiptop. Despite their proprietary approach, I think they have the most comfortably usable keyboard of any of the small pda-phones I've used.

Well, there's also LyME, and Mathpad. Not exactly Mathematica or Matlab or Maple, but if you really need that kind of power you should carry a laptop with you...

The Sidekick is great, but too bulky for your average Joe. It's too bulky for me too, to be honest, so I just suffer with my otherwise very excellent Samsung S105 cell phone, which nominally lets me monitor incoming emails. The most promising models I've seen are the upcoming SPH-I500 (as in here) and similar phone-form-factor Palm PDAs, which come very close to what I want. Add one of those newfangled laser-keyboard devices, and you've got a winner IMHO. And PLEASE stop sticking cameras on every phone.

In a fit of nearsighted vision, I got 10 Visor Deluxes, 10 Xircom 802.11b Springport modules, and 10 3Com Audreys from liquidation sales last year. I had the idea to put the Visors into ad-hoc mode, and dot an area with these nodes to provide a mesh network. But so what? With the Springport slot occupied, I can't find any peripherals, like a camera, to give the nodes anything worth contributing to the network once they're on it. The Audreys look even more limited. The mesh is up, but what can I use it for?

Will we have massive Star Wars fans calling in sick everyday in attempts to become a jedi?

If you have a Palm, this would be cheaper than what's likely to become the next Evercrack...

5 hours of talk time and 100 hours of standby time.

Yea, but your phone is also 8 ounces which a little bigger than my cell phone (4 ounces...which is rather heavy anyhow). And belive it or not, that's a rather heavy size for a handheld phone that's going to cost $400 to replace!!!

On the other hand, my phone is well under $100 and even comes free with some services...

The other advantage of my phone is that the screen is rather tough...versus my Palm's touch screen which is rather "fragile".

For the $400 that you pay for one of those, I can buy my phone, and an new color Palm for the same price. And still have some $$$ left over for a nice case, a li-ion battery, and a few months of service.

if you can't remember to plug in your phone each night you've got problems.

Really? Well, I guess you're right then, because I still forget to take it out of my coat pocket...which brings me to another point...I don't guess it's very easy to fins accessories for this phone (cases, chargers, batteries, etc).

And as far as I can tell, that's still got to be fairly small compared to the screen on my Palm IIIxe.

As well, if I'm not mistaken, there have been complaints about the phone portion of that phone being of poor quality, poor integration with the PDA portion, etc. That's just the point, it's hard to do everything in one device...some thing has to suffer or the thing is going to be too expensive. Which yours is, but it still has problems. I don't doubt that you like your phone, just that alot of us don't see it the same way.

Poor security policy. Before I got there everything was on palm pilots that were kept out in the open and then relayed over the phone to the helpdesk when changed. I at least forced them to get some encryption software for the palm pilot. Thats what you get for an ASP founded by ex-accounts looking to make a buck in the dot com days by reselling open source tools, sun servers, and various databases for 10's of times their real value.

Hey,

The article implies that this is somehow software-based, and most people probably thought 'Bullshit', and rightly so.

A google search for Palm damage motherboard turns up some better articles: This one, and a follow-up here are both pretty good.

The guy making the claim has a page here. The guy (called Greg Gaub) details his story in which his Hewlett packard desktop computer's motherboard was ruined; Greg's claim is that the motherboard was damaged because of a faulty or badly designed Palm V cradle which doesn't dissapate static charges.

Quoth I: As you may be aware, The PalmV and Vx devices have an aluminum casing. They also have a cradle with, in my opinion, a design flaw that does not dissipate static electric charges that travel from a person (holding or reaching for their PalmV) into the cradle, and on into the desktop computer's motherboard via the serial connector.

It does seem a somewhat unlikely problem, but I suppose it could be possible, in theory at least.

Michael

Hey,

The article implies that this is somehow software-based, and most people probably thought 'Bullshit', and rightly so.

A google search for Palm damage motherboard turns up some better articles: This one, and a follow-up here are both pretty good.

The guy making the claim has a page here. The guy (called Greg Gaub) details his story in which his Hewlett packard desktop computer's motherboard was ruined; Greg's claim is that the motherboard was damaged because of a faulty or badly designed Palm V cradle which doesn't dissapate static charges.

Quoth I: As you may be aware, The PalmV and Vx devices have an aluminum casing. They also have a cradle with, in my opinion, a design flaw that does not dissipate static electric charges that travel from a person (holding or reaching for their PalmV) into the cradle, and on into the desktop computer's motherboard via the serial connector.

It does seem a somewhat unlikely problem, but I suppose it could be possible, in theory at least.

Michael