Palm Unveils Three HandheldsPalm Unveils Three Handhelds

Palm Inc. on Wednesday released three handheld models and new software designed to make the devices more useful in a business environment.

Two of the devices are designed specifically for business users. The Tungsten T3, retailing for $399, becomes the company's new high-end model. The T3's most prominent feature is its innovative 320-by-480-pixel color display, part of which is hidden under its control pad and buttons. If users want a wider screen, they can pull the bottom portion of the device down, increasing its total length and revealing an extra inch of screen hidden underneath the controls. The screen can also be set for either landscape or portrait mode with one button press. Other features include a 400-MHz Intel XScale processor, 64 Mbytes of RAM, built-in Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and improved multimedia capabilities.

"The T3 is a very nice piece of hardware," Gartner analyst Todd Kort says. "If you compare it to where [Palm was] a year ago, when they released the original Tungsten at $499, this is a much better product, and it's $399. The 320-by-480 display is as good as anything Sony's put out, and the landscape and portrait rotation is something nobody else has figured out."

The midrange Tungsten E, which retails for $199, features a 320-by-320-pixel color display, a 126-MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 311 ARM processor, and 32 Mbytes of memory.

Palm has also revamped its core applications for Tungstens, making them more friendly with enterprise applications and increasing their compatibility with features such as built-in support for Microsoft Outlook. Improved personal information manager software allows more contact files, repeating tasks, and alarms; better agenda views; and the ability to schedule events that span midnight.

Beginning Oct. 1, Tungsten users also will be able to download an IBM Java Virtual Machine that will let them run all kinds of Java applications developed for a mobile workforce. That could be could be good news for Palm's ambition of selling more handhelds directly to businesses, if only the company and its partner IBM could garner more attention. "IBM has been working for a couple years on this WebSphere stuff and trying to make it a platform of its own," Kort says. "They're pretty close to having something that will appeal to enterprise users, but they really need to promote it a little better."

Not all the new products were aimed at businesses. Palm also released a new entry-level handheld, the Zire 21, which retails at $99. The device, which replaces the top-selling original Zire, features a black-and-white screen, a 126-MHz TI OMAP processor, and 8 Mbytes of RAM--four times as much as the original Zire.