Palm VII Field Trial

Querist wrote in with some review experiences of the Palm VII. I can't really confirm or deny if this is real, but it looks legit so I'm running it. Some interesting comments about the next generation of PDAs. Hit the link to read it. querist writes "I am on the field trial of the Palm VII ... the Palm system with the wireless internet and e-mail. To put it mildly, this thing ROCKS. Fairly quick connection via the local cellular phone network (account is set up by 3COM/Palm Computing) with e-mail.

It comes with 2 mb RAM and a host of PQAs -- Palm Query Apps, including MapQuest, Yahoo! People Search, E*Trade, ESPN.com, ABCNews, and OAG flights, to name a few. It also has the standard applications, including (I have a Pilot 1000 upgraded to 1MB normally) an app for the Graffiti chart so you don't have to use your pen shortcut for it and all of the other normal apps.

I've tested numerous 3rd party apps with it and they all work just fine, including games with greyscale!

The "backlighting" isn't. The pixels themselves glow green when you activate the lighting. That's right... the pixels glow green, not the background. It looks really odd at first, but you get used to it. No more using your Palm units as night lights, folks. :-)

The service is good, but they're still working out the prices for air-time (metered by the KB) and the actual units.

A couple of VERY nice features are that most of the web sites which you hit with the PQAs will warn you if a download is more than 1kb, and on the e-mail it will only download the first 500 or so bytes and then tell you how much is left, so you can opt to get more, get all that's left, or delete the message without spending your KBs for the month.

Overall, I am very impressed with the unit and we have some solid potential uses here at my company for this new technology. I would strongly urge anyone who is working and developing PalmOS applications for business use to look into the Palm VII for applications which need to access large amounts of data on the run.

No, I am not a Palm Computing or 3 COM employee. I just think PalmOS is a great OS to use for handhelds and it's great that there are good Linux apps out there for development, so I can limit my Windows time to playing games with my 4 yr old.

-Q "