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Unless you have been standing on a ticket line for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for the past three months, you probably know that the Palm VII, Palm Computing's newest organizer, comes with built-in wireless data access.
I tested the unit in NETWORK COMPUTING'S Real-World Labs in Washington, and found that its special effects weren't enough to make me overlook the thin plot and high ticket price (slightly less than $600, plus access charges).
If you want a full-featured mobile e-mail and Web browsing tool, look elsewhere; the high cost, low-bandwidth/data rate, restricted Web browsing, lack of POP3 support or TCP/IP access and extremely high usage-based monthly fees will prevent it from becoming a widespread horizontal-market success.
For urban enterprises that employ mobile workers, the Palm VII might be a useful wireless development platform, especially for accessing lowbandwidth corporate intranet data. However, though the vendor says that the device wasn't designed to be a generalpurpose product, the Palm VII may be a victim of its own hype and design compromises.
Slight of Hand
Although the Palm VII looks like a slightly stretched Palm III with an antenna tucked into its side, the vendor claims that it contains more than twice the number of discrete components in earlier Palm units. Unfortunately, the choice of Bell- South Intelligent Wireless Network (Mobitex) for maximum geographical coverage severely limits the device and makes the data very expensive. The system-level code for wireless access is modular and pluggable, but that won't help if...