Palm Finally Announces SD WiFi Card

Estranged42 writes "After years of waiting, Palm announced today that it will release an SD 802.11b card for its Tungsten T3 and Zire 72 handhelds. This comes after years of anticipation and speculation about this card ever happening. It should be arriving sometime in September for $129. I think I'm still looking forward to getting one. The Register and others are carrying the story."

Comments

Re:still using palms

[Klar]

I think in most cases a 12" notebook would work better. But, palm's are useful if you need something really small that could fit in your pocket and not have to carry a 4lbs small notebook. Palm's are great for keeping track of names, apointments, general information and taking notes while on the run.

Re:still using palms

[Planesdragon]

* cost of the model
* power consumption
* familiarity
* ease of use

For $1,000 (the cost of a 12" iBook) I can purchase new palms with Wifi cards for myself, my wife, and an extra just for the fun of it.

Even if the iBook had equal power consumption on all components (which is unilkely, given screen size alone), a single palm still uses far less kw/H than the iBook for any given task. Solid-state memory and an always-on OS eliminate both boot-up time and HD seek.

A lot of people can use their palms as easily as a computer. For some folks, it's even easier.

And, of course, if I want to have a palm in the TV room just for random web lookups, I don't need to configure an ibook or leave it out. When i want to pull up the data from a website, I can simply turn on the palm, click on the web-browser program (which can even be bound to a buttom) and go right to the site.

Re:still using palms

[Rude Turnip]

Given the size of a Palm device and the situations in which you would need Wifi with such a device (ie on the go, not doing anything multimedia intensive), it makes perfect sense to go with a more affordable solution.

Review and More Info

[joncarwash]

Here is a nice full review from PalmInfocenter. It goes into full details and testing of the new SDIO Wireless card from PalmOne.

Some have asked how is this different than the SanDisk SDIO Wireless card for Palm that was released a short time ago. This description from SanDisk explains that its card is only for the Palm Zire 71 and products using recent versions of MS PocketPC. The new PalmOne card supports the Zire 72 and Tungsten T3, which the SanDisk card does not (apparently due to driver compatibility issues).

I own a PalmOne Tungsten E, which is the business value model, and there is not wireless support via SDIO cards, and doesn't look to be one available due to the power constraints of the Tungsten E model. Apparently, there have been some tests run with the SanDisk card on the Tungsten E, and it will work, but long-term effects on the SDIO slot have not been studied, and there could be damaging effects on the unit. Tungsten E users that want some sort of wireless connection should check out the Enfora Wireless Portfolio Case which seems to be the only wireless connection available for the Tungsten E.

Personally, I don't need wireless via my PDA since I already have a laptop and wireless card, but I know it is a nice feature, and on a future PDA I would want wireless to be available.