Palm reads a brighter future

MANY DREAM of a day when a digital camera will mean attaching a small device onto a handheld computer. Attach another device, and the handheld is a voice recorder. Using Bluetooth technology, send both pictures and recordings to a computer miles away. Then unfold a portable keyboard to e-mail your partner about what's cooking.

That future is today. Almost. Palm, the leader of the handheld pack, has introduced it's latest - m500 and m505 - in the Indian market, but with customs regulations in place, the models will be like Superman without his x-ray vision, bionic hearing and sixth sense.

Doesn't matter really. A flying Clark Kent with some extra dose of super strength is still more than good enough.

The new Palms, unveiled recently in Chennai, are not mere upgradations on the previous versions - they are the next rung in evolution.

For basics, they are just slightly larger than your pocket phone book, and weigh a little more than 100 grams. Both models are PC and Macintosh compatible, run on Palm OS 4.0, come with 8 MB storage and support more than 50 add-on applications.

That's not all. ``We have done Microsoft better than the fellows at Microsoft,'' says a spokesman of Palm. The handhelds come with free software for Microsoft Word and Excel, and also an MGI PhotoSuite to store digital still and moving pictures.

The Palms can browse the Net with a mobile phone for a wireless modem, or by connecting to computers and regular lines through infrared. Of course, it also helps bring SMS back in vogue.

Webpages can even be stored for offline browsing.

But the most powerful aspect about the two models is what the company believes will make the ``Palm the centre of all technology''.

The expansion slots of the new models support SD cards, which are already evolving to be the industry standard for smart, mobile electronic devices like MP3 Players, digital cameras and mobile phones.

The cards not only allow Palm to develop thinner models, but also allow for a greater level of inter-operability not imaginable earlier.

These cards, the size of your thumb, come with software like dictionary and thesaurus, a host of games, or can just be used as expansion or back-up storage cards.

By Feroze Ahmed

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Section  : Features
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