Palm's Latest: Some Advances, Some Frustrations

You can't count on getting special attention by waving around a handheld organizer. For all the people who use one to store addresses, appointments and other easily forgotten data, many more seem content to satisfy their small-shiny-gadget cravings with a cell phone or MP3 player, while getting by with paper organizers of one kind or another.

That flaunting a handheld has lost its power to impress represents both a victory and a defeat for Palm. This company popularized this category of hardware, but along the way it somehow forgot how to wow spectators -- aside from the Treo Smartphone, an ingenious fusion of cell phone and organizer.

Its two latest handhelds aren't likely to change that state of affairs. One finally offers wireless Internet at a reasonable price, while the other adds a color screen to Palm's entry-level design. They're not bad, but they also don't represent any great achievements. Their best chance of success may lie in continued mistakes by Palm's competitors -- not just vendors of devices running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software, but also wireless phone companies and MP3-player manufacturers.

Palm's $299 TX would have had techies buzzing in anticipation three years ago, on account of its built-in WiFi wireless networking. But until recently, Palm restricted this feature to the much pricier Tungsten C, allowing rival Windows Mobile devices to offer built-in WiFi for much less.

Now, with the TX, mainstream Palm users can see how much simpler Palm's WiFi software is compared with Microsoft's gummed-up interface. Aside from entering the lengthy alphanumeric passwords many wireless access points require, most other WiFi tasks demanded just a single tap of the TX's touch-sensitive screen.

The TX includes the same Blazer Web browser and VersaMail e-mail software as the Treo 650, but these programs become far more useful with WiFi's speed -- and without having to pay a cell phone service to get you online. For example, instead of just looking up the Web site of a band you just heard, you can also download the MP3s on that page. And the ability to shift the TX's screen from portrait to landscape orientation with the tap of a button lets you view Web sites and mail messages with much less scrolling.

The TX also includes Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology Palm mistakenly emphasized over WiFi, but the half-baked Bluetooth software on many cell phones and Windows computers means few users will bother making much use of this feature.

By popping an SD Card into a slot at the top of the TX, you can expand this handheld's memory beyond the nearly 115 megabytes available -- and turn it into a decent digital-music player and photo viewer. (The TX's rechargeable, non-replaceable battery allowed almost nine hours of music playback with WiFi and Bluetooth left on.)

The included Pocket Tunes program is a far better MP3 program than the lame RealPlayer Palm used to bundle, but it also stuttered a few times in playback. If you want to listen to Windows Media Audio files, such as those sold at most non-iTunes sites, you'll need to pay $35 for an upgrade.

The Media photo-movie program can show family pictures and the occasional map, while DataViz's Documents To Go allows you to read and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

The TX's big flaw surfaces when you use the core address book, calendar, to-do and memo programs -- a too-skinny input area for its Graffiti 2 handwriting-recognition software. (This software requires you to write simplified forms of letters and numbers with a stylus, a skill that takes some practice to get right.)

This parcel is about a quarter-inch narrower than the one on older Palms, making it too easy to tap the program-launch icons on either side (which are themselves wider than on earlier models).