16. Conclusion

Without a doubt the Palm IIIc with color display and the Palm Vx with monochrome screen are mature products that convince with their intuitive menus and functions. Despite their high price of at least $300 they offer all the functions that a user needs in a personal organizer. They are smaller and weigh less than a classic day timer from the stationary store.

The manufacturer tries to simplify the task of transferring the user's addresses and telephone numbers from the PC to the small electronic organizer. If you still keep your address list in a book, you will need a lot of time to fill the small handheld. Once that's done you are ready to go. If you do a lot of business traveling with your notebook, you will find that the Palm IIIc or Palm Vx are ideal companions. These small PDAs fit in every suit pocket, and unlike the laptop they do not need time to boot. Of course the Palm IIIc or Vx are not a substitute for a comfortable word processor, spreadsheet or Powerpoint. Then the laptop clearly is the better choice. But the Palms are ideally suited for appointments, tasks or notes, especially since you can transfer all data and entries to your PC or laptop.

In a field test the rechargeable battery of the Palm survived three days under normal conditions. This excludes draining the battery by playing a lot of games. Especially the Palm IIIc with color screen only runs a few hours if the display is on all the time. However, even after one week with 'officially' empty batteries no data was lost. Therefore, these new Palms seem to keep a little energy reservoir to store data by not allowing the display to come on if the battery is not charged to a certain extent. When the first models came out a few years ago many users complained that the data simply disappeared when the battery was empty.

In the next articles we will show you how you can upgrade the Palm for the Internet and mobile phones. A software update lets you receive your emails and surf the Internet with a mobile phone from the road. You will also find out how you can say good-bye to your serial cable and use the infrared interface.