Hand-helds
What The Market Has To Offer

When the hand-held made its debut in 1996, all it could do was maintain your diary and calender. The device is now more technology enabled. However, despite demands for sophistication, designers have kept it free of frills, making it one of the most successful inventions of modern times.

In the last few years, Palm has permitted licensing of the Palm OS to other companies with the result that you have 20 different models from 10 companies. These are all termed as Palms and are each variants on the original.

First on the list is the Handspring Visor. It has place for any of the 25 add-ons thanks to its socket. The Visor Platinum, with its 33MHz claims to work quicker than any of the other Palms. It may not seem very alluring right now, but as new features get added on to the Palms such as music players, photo editors, spreadsheets and more, speed may be the most welcome.

The Visor Prism comes with a colour screen which is quite power exhaustive. It has batteries that need to be recharged every few days. As of now, most Palm programs are available in black and white but in case there's a strong preference for colour screens this is just for you.

If it is sleekness that appeals to you most, then take a look at Sony's Cli Palmtop. It is narrower than a Palm Vx and as thin as it. It is, according to Sony " a personal entertainment organiser". The memory stick that comes with it (ranging from capacities of 8 megabytes to 64 megabytes) can switch data among Sony camcorders, digital cameras and laptops. For functional purposes however they can give you digital photos onto your palmtop and offer backup for Cli programs and data. They cannot do the real running part of any program when on the memory stick; they need to be copied into Cli's main memory. Another attractive Cli feature is the thumb-wheel that allows scrolling through programs list items. In many ways it seems way ahead of its times.

The Palm Inc has come up with the latest and least expensive model- the M100. It has a plastic screen, which makes it less likely to break if dropped. The screen is however smaller; this translates into sharper but smaller types. This model comes with a cable which connects to your computer. A cost effective as well as handy feature. As far as memory is concerned it has around 2 Mb which may be inadequate when it comes to loading web based programs. Unlike the other Palm models and the Sony model, the m100's operating system cannot be updated.

The times ahead are sure to bring with it better features and improvements in the field of hand-helds. The aspects awaiting improvement should be the case sizes, screen features and additional wireless options.

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