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COMDEX for Palm Geeks

© Janice Karin

I'm pleased to report that the Palm booth was by far the busiest at the show. Compared to Microsoft and HP which were generally fairly empty and Toshiba and Dell which got some traffic but never approached "shoulder-to-shoulder" bodies, the Palm booth was a bustling never-ending throng of people. This flies in the face of the industry gloom and doom predictions that Palm is dying and Pocket PC is taking over the world.

Palm itself showed off its new Zire and Tungsten T devices in a large demonstration area and also showed off new accessories including the new Ultra Thin Keyboard, the Tungsten W, and SD cards in seperate kiosks inside the main booth. The big draw was, as always, the presentation. This year's presentation concentrated on the new devices and demonstrating the power of Bluetooth.

Other companies with kiosks inside the Palm booth included Landware, iGo (with partner Cutting Edge Software; both are owned by the same parent company), DataViz, Rhinoskin, and Veo. The most interesting new accessory came from Veo - and SDIO camera. A relatively small camera with a freely rotating head capable of taking VGA (640x480) pictures, their new camera was a big hit.

In the software arena, the new ACT! for Palm was demonstrated. I must admit that although it is a step forward, I was disappointed in the software as released. It's pretty limiting particularly for people already using ACT! who have lots of history and notes attached to their entries - you can only move 15 of each to the Palm the first time you sync although subsequent syncs will support additional new notes and histories.

There were a lot of PDA accessories in other booths as well. Belkin had a large booth of its own and a new stylus with a light-up tip. Several Taiwanese companies had interesting keyboards including a clear flexible ergonomic keyboard that had me salivating. Quite a few companies also had Bluetooth products including Chic which is in the process of developing a PDA keyboard that uses both IR and Bluetooth to connect to your Palm.

There were also new non-Palm OS devices including a neat little clamshell Pocket PC device from Samsung, the Nexio, and the Danger HipTop PDA/phone currently being sold through T-Mobile. A company named CMC also had several Pocket PC, Linux, and Penbex OS devices. Penbex OS is apparently a clone of Palm OS - looking at a Penbex OS device feels like looking at a Palm OS device. I also saw the new Sharp Linux PDAs even though they weren't on the show floor.

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