PCs? Forget 'Em!

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I was lost in gadget reverie the other evening on the train, fiddling with a sleek new Palm Vx, when I felt a fellow commuter plop down next to me. He sat close--too close--so I looked up and saw a man in a suit leaning over me, peering at my screen. "Got any good games?" he asked. Then he whipped out his own Palm (some kind of III) and pointed it at me. No good games, I admitted, but I did have Vindigo, a real-time list of things to do in Manhattan. "Cool!" he said. "I've got a subway map. Want it?" So right there, on the 6:24 to Huntington, we engaged in the Palm ritual known as "beaming"--using our infrared ports to swap programs wirelessly. We both got so excited about beaming with a stranger that we made e-business cards and beamed those too. We were beaming like idiots, and no one noticed. There were at least half a dozen other people in the car lost in their own Palms.

We have finally reached the tipping point. Well over 6 million people now own a Palm--the personal digital assistant that accounts for 79% of the market--and use it for everything from managing their calendars to playing infrared Pong. While there are some advantages to having a PDA that runs Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system--most new Pocket PC-running machines feature color, digital music players, handwriting recognition and ClearType, a way to make pages more readable on small screens--Palm remains the standard in the handheld world. There are something like 3,000 programs written for the Palm OS and only a few hundred for the Microsoft platform. Among those 3,000 programs are applications that easily work with virtually every Microsoft program, rendering compatibility with your favorite desktop software a nonissue.

So the question is, Which Palm OS-running machine should you buy? Last year I figured it would be Handspring's Visor, a Palm clone. It runs the same operating system and the same programs. But unlike the Palm line, Visor has a Game Boy-like slot in the back that allows you to drop in gear to extend the machine's functionality. Great idea, but as of last week I could find only three hardware add-ons that were available in retail stores--a modem, a universal remote and a digital camera. The EyeModule ($149) camera is a particularly fun idea, but the color images are a murky 320x240 pixels.

The Palm line does not have a special slot, but there are already a bunch of peripherals that fit onto the serial connection at the bottom of the devices. Last week I tried out a global-positioning system, a clip-on that superimposes a real-time compass onto any map, a digital voice recorder and a probe that checks variables like light, salinity and temperature. (I'm told it was recently used to take the temperature of a pregnant baboon--I hope they sent me a fresh one.) Clearly, this isn't a battle that will be won on the add-on front.

So here's my analysis: Buy what you can afford. The Handspring Visor, at $149, is kind of like the VW Bug of yesteryear. It's cheap, has a certain elegance and runs on the same gas as the Palm line. But if you want a luxury ride with tons of options, go with a Palm. Either way, you can still beam.

To learn more about PDAs, check out our website at timedigital.com/pda Questions for Josh can be sent to jquit@well.com