Palm, Inc. has rolled out two new handheld organizers: one aimed at the high-end mobile professional market and the other aimed squarely at the hoi polloi who want a simple organizer, a color screen and a low price.
The Palm TX handheld is priced at $299, and features an big color screen (by PDA standards: 320 by 480 pixels, supporting 65,000 colors), plus 128 MB of RAM and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking. The TX is intended to bring PDA Wi-Fi to a more reasonable price point for professionals without sacrificing the business-oriented features that market has come to expect. Of course, in addition to standard PDA features schedule, calendar, and contact management, the Palm TX enables users to browse the Web, send and receive email, transport documents and files, listen to MP3s, read ebooks, and more. The TX also ships with DataViz’s Documents To Go Professional Edition for viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents, and includes a 3.5 mm headphone jack, support for MultiMediaCard, S, and SDIO cards, and a multiconnector which offers USB support. The only obvious downsides to the Palm TX are that it doesn’t currently support WPA Enterprise Wi-Fi (necessary in some corporate environments) and doesn’t include a digital camera, an increasingly ubiquitous accessory in the PDA and smartphone market.
In contrast, and Palm Z22 handheld is a just-the-basics-ma’am model designed to appeal to the mass market and first-time PDA users with a color screen and a $99 price point. The Z22 features a 160 by 160 color display (which should be comfortable to anyone who has used recent mobile phones), 32 MB of RAM (20 MB accessible to the user), mini-USB for synchronization, and a tiny 3.4 ounce footprint. The Z22 ships with Palm OS 5.4 and the standard slate of contact, calendar, and schedule management tools, plus a couple games and software to display photos. Of course, many third-party applications for the Palm will run on the Z22, although the unit includes no Internet or networking software: it’s a tiny, standalone organizer which can sync back to your desktop, but don’t expect to use it to manage make real-time stock trades via the Internet.
