Palm corners 75% of mart for handheld operating systems

Palm Inc., the leading provider of personal companion handheld computers, has reinvented the personal digital assistant (PDA) by introducing a high-end, expandable, and wireless-capable handhelds which will be available in the Philippines by next week.

This, as Sharon Ee, Palm Asia Pacific group marketing manager, told The STAR that the Palm operating system now leads the market for handheld operating systems, accounting for a 75-percent share of the market.

Palm has sold around 13 million handheld units in 54 countries. As of January 2001, nine out of every 10 handhelds sold in the US were Palm powered.

The company unveiled a new era in sleek, expandable handheld computing – the Palm m500 series handhelds. The new models – the Palm m500 monochrome handheld and the Palm m505 color handheld – are capable of expansion both in terms of memory and applications, as well as of Internet access.

The first in the industry, these models have Secure Digital (SD) and MultiMediaCard expansion slot about the size of postage stamps. According to Ee, Palm selected the SD and MultiMediaCard technology for the expansion slots because the small size allows Palm to maintain its sleek form.

Like Palm, more than 200 companies, including Panasonic, Toshiba, and SanDisk, have committed to support the SC card standard for use in multiple consumer products using technologies like Bluetooth, a new wireless standard that will enable products to communicate seamlessly with one another within a 30-foot range. Panasonic was one of the companies that co-developed the SD memory card.

Ee said users can now easily carry additional memory, video clips, images, applications, games, backup capability, among others. The expansion cards range from eight MB to 256 MB and can find application in a variety of consumer electronic products like printers, digital cameras, and MP3 players.

The m500 handheld series also includes the Palm Mobile Connectivity software that will allow customers to connect to the Internet and manage e-mail and short messaging service or text messages anytime and anywhere using a compatible modem or mobile phone.

This software also includes the web clipping technology, which enables handheld users to access popular web content such as United Airlines, DBS Bank, Street Directory.com, Singapore Airlines, Yahoo! and Visa Intel. More than 600 web clipping applications can be downloaded for free at the palm website.

Also included in the m500 handheld series are a number of software applications which if bought separately, can cost more than $100. These include the Palm Reader which allows users to read electronic books using their Palm handhelds, the DataViz Documents To Go 3.0 which enables users to view and edit Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, the MGI Photosuite Mobile Edition that allows users to view and share images and video clips, among others.

Among the content and utility cards that go with the series are the travel cards which include travel guides to the US, Europe and Asia Pacific; games, and reference dictionary/thesaurus card; as well as the backup card and 16MB expansion card.