Breathe easy, Palm fans. You no longer need to mumble excuses or brag about your Palm's battery life when people walk by with their Windows CE-based, color-screened PDAs. The Palm IIIc gives you the colors you've been waiting for. And guess what? You can still brag about battery life. Alas, the Palm IIIc isn't cheap; at $449, it ties with the wireless Palm VII as the most expensive model. But in my book, color is worth the surcharge.
The IIIc impressed me right out of the box, with its dark, slate-colored case-a bit sexier than older models' medium gray. And the screen-oh, that TFT, active-matrix color screen. With a resolution of 160 by 160 pixels and only 256 colors, it may not match some of the CE screens for photo-realistic color, but the Palm's new color screen makes an astounding difference in readability. Even at the default 25 percent brightness level, I had no trouble viewing text or graphics under harsh fluorescent lights or in twilight conditions-something I couldn't say about previous models.
There are some minor physical differences between the IIIc and the rest of the series. The IIIc is 0.36 inches longer than the other 4.7-inch long, 3.2-inch wide, 0.7-inch III models, and also a bit heftier-6.8 ounces versus the IIIx's 6 ounces. But despite its larger size and extra weight, the IIIc is still quite comfortable in your palm or pocket. Numerous subtle shape enhancements include application launch buttons that are concave instead of rounded, a charge indicator light at the top of the unit, and an infrared port that is flush with the top edge of the unit instead of angled downward as with older models. In addition, the IIIc includes the sturdier, metal-barreled stylus bundled with the III and V models instead of the flimsier plastic stylus offered with the inexpensive models.
Battery life, along with elegant simplicity, has always been the Palm's biggest advantage over Windows CE PDAs. After testing HP's Jornada 420 and Casio's E-100-two color CE units that did well to last two hours on a full charge-I was skeptical about the battery life Palm could wring out of the IIIc's color screen. I needn't have been. At 25 percent brightness, the IIIc lasted an amazing 13.75 hours on a single charge of its rechargeable Lithium Ion battery. I upped the brightness to about 50 percent-bright enough for just about anyone-and the IIIc still managed a respectable nine hours.
The IIIc uses a new version of the Palm OS, 3.5, primarily as an update to support color. The new OS also offers some much-needed, though minor, improvements. You can now tap at the top of the screen to access menus. Writing the command stroke calls up a bar full of icons to select from (instead of forcing you to write another character).
Though the Date Book has been improved, the IIIc's other basic applications are hardly better than those that shipped with the original III. Two irritations from the dawn of the unit still exist. The worst is being forced to both open an e-mail and a dialog box to delete an e-mail message. Since I receive upwards of 50 e-mails per day, this tedious procedure keeps me from using the Palm as an e-mail reader. Why Palm doesn't simply rework the Palm VII's similar iMessenger app, which allows mass selection and deletes, is beyond me. The second annoyance stems from the Address Book's list view, whose scrunched, truncated fields are sometimes impossible to decipher. A global adjustment for this would make my day.
Bug Spray, Anyone?
You'll need to update some of your favorite third-party apps before they'll run correctly on the IIIc. Several of my favorite programs crashed or behaved oddly; CIC's Jot character-recognition engine--which I prefer to Graffiti-worked, but its Show Ink option didn't. The freeware Launch Pad by Eric Kenslow wouldn't run at all, though the $10 updated version--Launch 'Em from Synergy Software--did. And even though most programs run fine, in many cases they will still need to be reworked to make good use of color.
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Jon L. Jacobi is a longtime Computer Currents contributing editor.
