Price: £249. The original Palm Pilot stunned the Psion and Windows CE camps by grabbing a massive 20 percent of the market in a few short months. It did this by emulating the most common and familiar human interface devices of all time - pen and notepad - using a touch-sensitive screen, a pen stylus and a conspicuous lack of keyboard. This simple but effective design has continued - after all, why change a winning formula - to the latest, sleekest Palm, the VII. But still, in the UK, it's the Vx that's making the sales; it too shares the original design characteristics. Yet, although it looks almost identical to the Palm V, there are some subtle differences in the Vx version. The CPU is now a 20Mhz Motorola device, while there's a whopping 8MB of memory (this is not an exaggeration - for Palm users 8MB is a huge amount of space). New software developments mean that the operating system is more intuitive in key areas. For example, there's now an at-a-glance option for listing all appointments and to-do items for a single day. And the synchronisation - the one-touch feature pioneered by Palm - can now be achieved over the unit's infra-red link, which is also useful for exchanging information with other palm users. For those who prefer it, though, the cradle method of synchronisation is still supported, and of course it recharges the batteries too. Of course, there's one area which might be of some concern to new users, and that's the lack of a keyboard. How do you enter data without one? As with other Palm machines, there's the option of an on-screen mini keyboard, but the preferable route, once you've learned its tricks, is to use the Graffiti handwriting recognition system. This does take some getting used to, and can only recognise one character at a time - and those characters are not exactly the same as the Latin alphabet - but for reasonably short durations it is an acceptable method of updating diary entries, making short notes and so on. Verdict Sleek, perfectly formed and easy to use, the Palm Vx is a masterpiece of the human-machine interface, which is why it sells so well. But despite improvements to the software and hardware, this is still not a machine for people looking for Web access on the move, or a colour screen.
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Handheld - 128 MB RAM - Screen: 4 in inch - Display: TFT active matrix - CPU: XScale PXA310 - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi - Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Classic
Jan 16th, 2001
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