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For urban enterprises that employ mobile workers, the Palm VII might be a useful wireless development platform, especially for accessing low-bandwidth corporate intranet data. However, though the vendor says that the device wasn't designed to be a general-purpose 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 you already have a Palm VII with hardware that's designed to work with Mobitex (the only option right now, though 3Com has hinted that other choices eventually will be available).

The Palm VII offers only two levels of service: a $9.99-per-month basic plan, which includes 50 KB of data, and a $24.99 expanded plan, which includes 150 KB of data. When you consider that an average Web clipping screen is about 500 bytes of data (and that you pay for both incoming and outgoing data), this might not seem so bad. But merely sending and receiving a couple of average-sized e-mails and downloading the full text of a few news articles ate through my allowance at a frightening rate.

Within a week of occasional use, I had easily burned more than half of my monthly 150 KB "expanded" allotment. (And after that, you pay by the kilobyte--and through the nose--at 30 cents per kilobyte.) For me, this calculates to at least $70 per month.

I'd have liked to see the vendor use CDPD and offer an unlimited usage option, similar to GoAmerica's $59.95-per-month plan. In addition, you can't use the Palm VII as a replacement alpha pager; it lacks an event-driven power-on, so it can't notify a user of incoming mail messages the way Research In Motion's BlackBerry can.

The Palm VII's transmitter uses a small internal NiMH battery, which is charged as needed from the two standard AAA alkaline cells. Of course, this has some adverse effect on battery life compared to the battery life you get with a Palm III. But after a week of moderate usage, my batteries showed about two-thirds capacity. Still, a rechargeable battery pack, like that in the Palm V, would be friendlier to the environment, not to mention your wallet.

Like the Palm IIIx and Palm V, the Palm VII's screen is sharp and clear, and the integrated wireless service was usually quite reliable throughout the D.C. metro area (see www.palm.net for coverage areas). Signal strength was good both inside and out, with the exception of my windowless office in the National Press Building, which also blocks Ricochet modem and some cellular coverage.

The Palm VII's backlight is the Indiglo-type, and it works well in low-light situations. The new Palm's stylus is embedded in a slot on the right side, which is reasonably handy, though I found it occasionally awkward and difficult to remove. Just above the stylus is the antenna--pulling it up powers on the transmitter.

Surfin' P.I.M.
When I received my Palm VII (and after charging the transmitter battery for the required 70 minutes), I painlessly sent my credit-card number over the network to activate the wireless service. It turned out this really was the five-minute process 3Com had promised, though I found that the online usage metering wasn't available until the following day. 3Com has made use of BellSouth's built-in data security, along with Certicom's Elliptic Curve Cryptography and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to its Palm.net back-end server. These capabilities ensure end-to-end secure communications, which is essential for users who are trading stocks, shopping and banking online.

Web browsing is accomplished via "Web clipping," a 3Com-coined term. Filter files called Palm Query Applications (PQAs) handle real-time reformatting for the small screen and minimize the amount of data sent over the wire. The PQAs also store a record of prior page fetches as a form of cache. The tools to construct PQAs are available for free at Palm Computing's Web site, but you must have a PQA on your Palm VII, as well as a server component running on the site itself, for each Web site that you want to visit. The Palm VII ships with more than 20 PQAs, and the company has plans to develop more. All the PQAs I used were well-designed and about as responsive as accessing Web sites over a POTS line.

Both incoming and outgoing e-mail is handled through Palm VII's "I-messaging" service, which connects you to an e-mail account at user@palm.net. You can't access Internet POP3 mail servers with the Palm VII, so if you want to use your usual ISP, you'll have to set up some type of rule-based forwarding. I don't recommend doing this, however, because your data allowance will be rapidly depleted. And accessing e-mail attachments? Perish the thought.

Send your comments on this article to Richard Hoffman at rhoffman@nwc.com.