samplenews1

Example Newsletter #1

Last week I attended the PalmPilot Developers Conference. Below is a summary of the great new stuff that was announced.

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Palm VII Wireless Device
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The Palm VII is a wireless Palm Connected Organizer. It looks just like a Palm III, but has a popup antenna on its right side, and a longer top.

The Palm VII is connected to the Internet through the Bell South paging network, which is available in most urban areas. If you can get a one-way page on their network, you will be able to connect to the Internet with a Palm VII.

The Palm VII is NOT designed to browse the Internet, but rather to get to specific kinds of information from people who would like to make it available to the Palm VII. For example, I saw someone who was able to quickly lookup what movies were playing at the local theater. The information came from a movie Web site, but was tailored to the display of the Palm VII. It took about ten seconds for the whole transaction, which is faster than it takes to pick up the phone and dial a phone number, or to even turn to the movie section in the newspaper and find the theater's listings. It was fantastic.

I also saw examples of getting the current weather, and a local traffic report. The Palm VII also includes a new email reader designed to intelligently read email wireless.

The fees for the service are not set, but are expected to range between $10 and $40 a month, depending on how much you use it. The average cost is around 20 to 30 cents per 1K of information transferred. That does not sound like a lot of information for the price, but what is pretty amazing about the Palm VII is all the support built-in to it to minimize the wireless traffic. There is lots of compression built-in, as well as security, and a lot of thought into what kinds of things can be done economically in this system. I was WOWed.

Field trials are set for early next year, and the product will officially ship later in the year.

More information is available on the 3Com Web site at http://www.palm.com/

Why call it the Palm VII? There was not any official answer, but my sense was that they are starting to differentiate product lines. The Palm VII "line" will be wireless, while other Palm product lines will have other capabilites.

Web Clipping
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The idea behind Web clipping is to pre-load as much stuff onto the Palm VII as possible. So, instead of going to the Web to download a Web page, you install a small application using standard HotSync, and that application acts as a front end to a database that sits on the Web. When you actually go to get something, only the real data gets transfered. The PalmPilot with the preloaded application takes care of formatting the data for the display, thus minimizing the amount of traffic across the wire.

To create one of these mini apps (called a PQA), you actually take an HTML page, add some special Palm tags, and then drop the HTML page on to the "PQA creator". The output is a PQA file that is the application that you pre-load onto your PalmPilot.

Japanese
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The operating system will be changing to allow for large character sets, like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. There is a large and faithful Palm community in Japan already.

Macintosh Desktop
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The new version of the Macintosh Desktop Software is now in beta. I have tried it, and it appears to be very stable. There is some mention of problems with categories, so if you don't play around with the categories on the desktop too much, you should be safe.

You can get to the new Mac desktop from the Palm Web site at http://www.palm.com/.

New Palm Hardware
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Technology partners showed off customized versions of the Palm.

Symbol technologies showed a Palm with a bar scanner in it. So what? Its pretty cool. I saw an application written by Steven's Creek Software that lets you scan a bar code, then print an invoice. The cool thing was that this happened completely wireless. The printer was a battery powered portable printer, and the Palm beamed the invoice to it through its infrared port. This is available today.

Qualcom showed a cellular phone that had an integrated Palm organizer, called the PDQ phone. The Qualcom phone will be available early next year.

Infrared Syncing
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The operating system will be getting some changes to do infrared sync'ing. There was no date announced for that.

The general feeling at the conference was incredibly up beat. There is so much going on around the PalmPilot that it is very hard to keep track of it all.

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Hands High News
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