People have been using them in Macs for years, too.
My 1999-model Powerbook predated internal 802.11 support, so I bought a Lucent WaveLAN card. No worries. I also used it in my circa-1997 PowerBook 2400c, again without a problem.
I think the point of the Wired article is that some set of TiBook users have moved beyond using the internal AirPort (tm) cards that are Apple-labeled, and are getting something like 4x the range using high-power 200-milliwatt external cards. Perhaps this will embarrass Apple into fixing the problems their flagship portable has with a technology they popularized...
I've had both a Blackberry and a Palm VII, and much prefer the Palm VII for my purposes.
For your purposes, I would go with one of the 2-way pagers, either the Blackberry or the T900. They have always-on email checking so you immediately know when a new message arrives, and they're dead simple to use.
A couple of misconceptions I've seen on the thread and elsewhere:
Someone said Palm VII service was "$50 plus bandwidth" -- they have three levels of service, at $10 with little bandwidth, $25 with fair bandwidth, and $45 with unlimited bandwidth.
Someone else mentioned that they got good coverage with their Blackberry, with the suggestion the Palm wouldn't match it. That's not true, as both are hosted on BellSouth's Mobitexx network, no matter who resells them (Palm, Skytel, Earthlink, etc.).
The ability to program web clipping applications for the Palm is why I think it's better for geeks. It's very easy to build WCAs to interact w/web pages built dynamically by Perl/Python/PHP. I looked at the SDK for the Blackberry, and it's a lot more work, and so less suited to quick, one-off applications.
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People have been using them in Macs for years, too.
My 1999-model Powerbook predated internal 802.11 support, so I bought a Lucent WaveLAN card. No worries. I also used it in my circa-1997 PowerBook 2400c, again without a problem.
I think the point of the Wired article is that some set of TiBook users have moved beyond using the internal AirPort (tm) cards that are Apple-labeled, and are getting something like 4x the range using high-power 200-milliwatt external cards. Perhaps this will embarrass Apple into fixing the problems their flagship portable has with a technology they popularized...
I've had both a Blackberry and a Palm VII, and much prefer the Palm VII for my purposes.
For your purposes, I would go with one of the 2-way pagers, either the Blackberry or the T900. They have always-on email checking so you immediately know when a new message arrives, and they're dead simple to use.
A couple of misconceptions I've seen on the thread and elsewhere:
Someone said Palm VII service was "$50 plus bandwidth" -- they have three levels of service, at $10 with little bandwidth, $25 with fair bandwidth, and $45 with unlimited bandwidth.
Someone else mentioned that they got good coverage with their Blackberry, with the suggestion the Palm wouldn't match it. That's not true, as both are hosted on BellSouth's Mobitexx network, no matter who resells them (Palm, Skytel, Earthlink, etc.).
The ability to program web clipping applications for the Palm is why I think it's better for geeks. It's very easy to build WCAs to interact w/web pages built dynamically by Perl/Python/PHP. I looked at the SDK for the Blackberry, and it's a lot more work, and so less suited to quick, one-off applications.