Palm PDA Can Tap ‘Wi-Fi’
Bringing wireless computing to an ever-smaller package, Palm Inc. plans to unveil today its first personal digital assistant capable of tapping into the increasingly popular “Wi-Fi” wireless networks.
Palm has trailed Toshiba Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in developing hand-held computers with the Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, standard. It allows users to connect to the Internet at “hot spots” in a growing number of airports, hotels, businesses, schools and restaurants.
The addition of Wi-Fi capability -- combined with more memory, a longer battery life and a higher-resolution screen -- will make Palm’s Tungsten C device a competitive alternative to the Toshiba and HP offerings, analysts say. The Tungsten C, which goes on sale May 5 for $499, could even grab market share from laptop computers.
Smaller, portable devices such as PDAs and laptops are “where a lot of the activity is” in wireless computing, said Roger Kay, an analyst with technology market research firm IDC.
Palm previously has sold PDAs that can dial into cell- phone networks, allowing users to send and receive e-mail and surf the Internet. Those models, including the Tungsten W and the I705, offer wireless access wherever a cellular network has a signal, but the connection fees can be expensive.
Connections via Wi-Fi, also known as 802.11, are cheaper, generally costing users about $30 to $40 a month for unlimited access. Wi-Fi hot spots extend only 300 feet from a radio transmitter, but cities such as Long Beach and Winston-Salem, N.C., are upgrading their entire downtown districts with wireless hot zones up to two miles wide.
“People are going to want more of these devices to keep up,” said analyst Todd Kort of Gartner Dataquest, another technology research firm. Neither he nor Kay owns shares in Palm.
Palm today also is launching the Zire 71, a PDA with a color screen that can play MP3 audio and digital video files and has a built-in digital camera. It sells for $299, about $100 less than the comparably equipped Clie from Sony Corp.
“These are the two best products Palm has ever made,” Kort said. “They’ve been lagging behind the competition in terms of engineering and design, and this shows they’re back in the game.”
Milpitas, Calif.-based Palm is the dominant manufacturer of PDAs, having sold some 21 million of the 27 million PDAs that run on Palm’s operating system.
