PalmOne VII Handheld

by Palm

Product Details

Product Manual [2.70mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00002EQCF
• Item model number: 3Com Palm VII
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,057 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 4, 1973

Product Description

From Winmag®

The new 3Com Palm VII connected organizer is just about everything you'd want in a pocket computer: It's useful, easy to operate and wirelessly connected. But the price of the connectivity is far beyond what most road warriors would be willing to pay.

The Palm VII is essentially a Palm III with wireless connectivity built in. While there are plenty of wireless solutions for palm-sized computers, the Palm VII's is by far the most elegant and the easiest to set up and use.

This latest version of the Palm is not the most advanced 3Com device in all respects. It offers neither the Palm IIIx's superior operating system and memory, nor the Palm V's stylish svelteness and rechargeable battery. The battery life is half that of the Palm III-the Palm VII will runs through two AAA batteries in about two or three weeks. It's also significantly bigger and heavier -- and in my opinion, uglier -- than any other Palm, making it too big for some shirt pockets, despite 3Com's ad pitch. For comparison, it's about twice as thick as the Palm V, and about 3/4 of an inch longer. And it doesn't come with a protective screen as do the Palm III and IIIx models.

Then there's the price, the highest in the Palm family. The unit itself costs $599, but there's an ongoing charge for the wireless service. Monthly service is $9.99 at a minimum, but more realistically you'll spend several times that given the limited access the basic plan allows and the steeply incremental costs of exceeding the limit. So if you're looking for a bargain, keep looking.

But if you can put up with these shortcomings, you get the ability to pay bills and transfer funds from a taxi cab, trade stocks during a boring meeting, and send and receive e-mail from almost anywhere.

The new Palm comes with access to 22 mostly impressive and free third-party wireless-content providers, including ABCNEWS.com, Bank of America, MovieFone, UPS and so on. Most of these services require the easy installation of a custom application; some are already installed. 3Com promises that many more content providers will come online over the next year.

Getting Connected
The Palm VII connects via radio waves to the BellSouth Wireless Data network, which covers most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. However, Montana, Wyoming, Hawaii and Alaska aren't covered at all, and other states have coverage in just one or two cities.

The cost of connectivity is by far the biggest "gotcha" of the Palm VII. The two basic option plans are $9.99 per month for basic and $24.99 for extended service, plus a $19.99 setup fee for each. The basic plan limits you to 50KB (that's right: kilobytes!) of data, while the extended plan covers 150KB per month. That's about 150 screenfulls and 450 screenfulls of information per month, respectively. If you exceed either limit, they'll charge you 30 cents for each additional kilobyte. That's a dime for every screenfull of information.

Just to give you an idea of how hard it would be to stick to the basic plan, that would cover only 30 e-mail messages, 20 stock quotes, 10 sports scores, 10 traffic reports and 10 weather reports per month. (This sample usage comes from the Palm VII wireless service plan documentation.) That works out to about one e-mail message per day, one or two stock quotes every other day, and one sports score, one traffic report and one weather report every three days. For $24.99 ($300 per year) you get three times that-roughly three e-mail messages a day, about three stock quotes each day, and so on.

Mercifully, the iMessenger e-mail application receives only the first two screens of any long e-mail message (20 cents worth). If you want to get the rest of the message, you can click on a couple of buttons and download it.

These service plans are practical if you want to receive only one or a few e-mails a day, and rarely connect to take advantage of the other great applications and services being offered. But for normal use - which would include sending and receiving dozens of e-mail messages per day and accessing some of the other services at least 10 times per day - expect to pay hundreds of dollars per month in service fees.

Getting slapped with bills like this won't faze Wall Street firms for whom up-to-the-second stock information is everything and money is no object. But 3Com must rethink this unrealistic pricing plan if it expects the device to be a hit with business travelers, salespeople or consumers. Accessing information wirelessly can be very slow going, taking anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds for every tap of the pen. The ABCnews.com service, for example, is hierarchical, and requires drilling down three or four layers to get to a story. Each layer requires a wait of between 10 and 15 seconds. The Wall Street Journal site required waits of up to 30 seconds per tap. Searching services such as the bundled US West DEX Yellow pages took about 10 seconds, which feels slow for a search. The sluggish access is partly a limitation of the BellSouth network, which tops out at about 9.6 kilobits per second. Performance may decrease further as more users come online. But having said all that, I was extremely impressed with the performance of the iMessenger e-mail application and service. I was consistently able to receive messages in my desktop inbox just 10 seconds after sending them from the Palm device, and vice versa. Incidentally, 3Com is your ISP for the Palm VII. You can't use another ISP, nor can you use 3Com as your ISP for your PC or any other wireless computer. In addition, you can't use your existing e-mail address to send and receive messages on the Palm VII, though of course you can set up an agent on your desktop to forward mail to the device. When you sign up for the service, Palm assigns you with a unique @palm.net address.

The Palm VII is particularly well suited for online banking, shopping and other e-commerce tasks. 3Com has done an admirable job of building in solid security features that assure private transactions, including Secure Sockets Layer support, bullet-proof encryption, message integrity checking and BellSouth network authentication. All packets travel through palm.net servers, ensuring only trusted data gets to your Palm. Wireless access to content and services helps mitigate the claustrophobic 2MB memory/storage maximum for the Palm VII. Instead of installing a dictionary, for example, you can use the bundled Merriam-Webster applet to look up words from a database so big it could never fit on any Palm device.

Until some software company creates the means to do so, you cannot browse the web using a Palm VII. Instead, the device uses "Web Clipping," a proprietary means of getting information by which content providers reformat real web content specifically for the Palm VII. The process strips out all the graphics and other bloated and extraneous stuff, and delivers content formatted for the Palm VII's low-bandwidth communications and tiny monochrome screen.

The Palm VII does not replace a pager, as it does not support notification. That would require that the device be always on, drastically shortening battery life. If you have e-mail waiting or incoming stock information, you must turn the Palm on and check for it. In keeping with the Palm philosophy of hypersimplicity, flipping up the antenna turns the device on.

What You Need to Know
The Palm VII is available only in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, though you can get connected at 260 urban locations across the country. The device will go on sale in the rest of the United States later this year, according to 3Com. The rollout is limited because the company wants to make sure they know what they're doing before getting deluged with customers. This is 3Com's first foray into the ISP and subscription service businesses, and they want to avoid a reputation for unresponsiveness.

Signing up for the connectivity services is remarkably easy. Unlike cell phones, pagers and other wireless devices, which require a company to activate the service for you, the Palm VII lets you activate the service yourself by simply following a step-by-step wizard-like process that takes about 10 minutes.

You cannot use the wireless connection to synchronize your Palm VII with a desktop computer. That's done with a cradle (included) that's physically connected to your PC.

The Palm VII uses two AAA batteries like all the other Palms except the Palm V, which has a fixed, rechargeable battery. To cope with the additional power requirements of wireless connectivity, the Palm VII also has a nickel-metal hydride battery for the transmitter that is actually recharged by the AAA batteries.

The Palm V's rechargeable solution is superior to the battery-swapping gymnastics required by the use of AAA batteries, something that's unfriendly both to the environment and to your wallet. With about half the battery life of the Palm III, the Palm VII should have been designed with a rechargeable battery.

The documentation is very good. It's simple yet thorough, unlike some manuals that make documentation simple by not telling you anything.

Though I didn't test them all, 3Com says any application that runs on a Palm III will run on a Palm VII.

The Bottom Line.
3Com should upgrade the operating system to the latest PalmOS version, bump the RAM up to at least 4MB, build in a rechargeable battery and reduce the size and weight of the device. And Palm must find a way to boost the performance of online queries.

But these are relatively minor quibbles about a generally excellent and supremely usable product. The showstopper is the price of connectivity--and that's why we do not recommend the Palm VII.

If you are looking for more affordable wireless access in a Palm-sized device, explore one of the many options available for the Palm III, Palm IIIx and Windows CE PPCs, or consider one of the smart pagers with PIM functionality. By the end of the year, you'll also be able to buy one of several smart phones, also with PIM features, that may rival the Palm VII in features and ease of use, but cost far less to use.

Another option is simply to wait until 3Com upgrades the Palm VII and downgrades the price.

MacAddict

We have seen the future, and it ain't cheap. Make no bones about it, the Palm VII is an info-freak and gadget-geek's dream. At heart, it's a Palm IIIx - sharing the Palm's new, sharper LCD screen, nonupgradable 2MB of RAM, and other handheld perks. It's bigger and heavier than earlier Palms, a half-inch taller and nearly an ounce heavier than a III, and it completely lacks the ultrathin design of the futuristic-looking Palm V.

The added girth comes from the VII's unique, built-in wireless modem. Using special Web-clipping applications called PQAs, freely downloadable from 3Com's Palm VII site (http://www.palm.net), the VII scoops compact packages of information from the Internet. PQAs include dozens of favorites like CNN, MapQuest, and e-Trade, and local movie schedules are just a few taps away (see "Pick Me Up at VII," below). But while you can review earlier downloaded information, PQAs don't remember your input - you'll have to scrawl passwords or zip codes each time.

Wireless email on the VII is as easy as email on your Mac. You use the included iMessenger for the proprietary Palm.net mail or third-party applications for your usual POP or IMAP accounts. You can view Web pages that lack a PQA via a third-party browser, though you won't get the graphics, tables, and frames. On the downside, while wireless access is available in about 260 metropolitan areas, huge swaths of the country remain inaccessible.

The real expense isn't the VII's $499 price tag - it's the wireless fees. For $10 a month, you get 50K of info - this comes out to a daily allotment of roughly one email message and a couple of reports. $25 a month buys three times that, but hard-core info junkies must shell out $40 a month for 300K, nearly equaling the cost of the Palm VII itself in a year. If you're iMac only, you'll also need to buy the $39.95 PalmConnect USB Kit.

If you're an info junkie needing up-to-the-second information in places wired modems don't reach, the Palm VII is for you. The rest of us will pick up a Palm modem and stick close to phone lines. -- Joseph O. Holmes

good news : Typical Palm ease of use. Dozens of free clipping apps. Thousands of standard Palm apps.

bad news : Expensive wireless service. Bigger and heavier than earlier Palms. Wireless service unavailable in many areas. PQAs don't remember input.

©1999 MacAddict Click here for a free trial issue

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One sweet device!, April 22, 2000

By 

WIRED (DeKalb, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PalmOne VII Handheld (Office Product)

OK, here is my scoop on this device.. I have seen some people saying that 2MB was not enough memory. BULL****. I have 88 applications on it and still have 900k free, which is a little under half left!.. I am an avid stock trader and use it to make my trades at work. Mytrack and Fidelity both allow you to trade via the palm if you have an account. I have one with Mytrack and recommend them. I also use it for weather, travel directions, email, news, movie times, white pages lookup, shopping comparison, checking flight schedules, UPS and FEDEX package tracking.. This device is SWEET! I had never had any interest in a palm device until I heard about the VII with wireless connection. I have had mine for a week now and can't put it down.. Very handy.. The internet connectivity through palm.net is a bit pricey but I am sure it will come down with time.. Unlimited access is 44.00 month.. They do have other plans available by the amount of data transmitted. Lifting the antenna gets you connected to the net in about 3 seconds.. The web clipping is fine, stock quotes, directions, phone number lookups, email, etc.. Granted this is not an Internet browser but a great second best, the email rocks, when you sign up with palm.net you get a free email account that you can check and send email from the palm.. Very cool.. I guess I only have one minor complaint, there is a bit of a glare sometimes when held at a certain angle.. Like I said a minor issue.. I bought it for the internet access but the built in address book and planner are nice too.. It is a little pricey at 450.00 but I do recommend it to anyone that has an interest in it but needs that confirmation from someone that has it already.. One last note, there are hundreds of applications for it that can be found on the Internet.. Some are shareware and some are freeware, Alot of the good one's are free.. Out of the 88 I have, there is only one that I have to pay for, a stock portfolio manager.. ENJOY!

89 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good First Effort!, February 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: PalmOne VII Handheld (Office Product)

Let me first admit that I've been a PDA (personal digital assistant) devotee since the beginning. I've owned several Apple Newtons, a Sony MagicLink and a HP 100LX. I've accessed email on those devices via landlines and wirelessly. During the last year, I've grown to love my RIM (Research in Motion) 950 wireless email pager. Why the obsession with PDA's? Because having ready, instant access to my schedule, to-do's, contacts and email is absolutely essential. Since Palms came out several years ago, I've owned five. I've purchased Palms for employees, family and for clients as gifts. With that said, where do I come out on the Palm VII? Mixed.

As with any Palm device, the VII helps to organize my life. Because it is a Palm device, it is the most widely supported and successful PDA in the world. As a wireless device, however, there are pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it nicely integrates into one device the highly regarded Palm functionality with wireless capability. Second, it is very easy to operate, anyone can be up and communicating wirelessly within minutes.

Other than wireless email, what can you do with the VII? You can buy and sell stocks (Fidelity Investment), track stocks (several), do your banking (BofA), locate ATMs (several), receive breaking news (ABC, BBC, ESPN, NY Times, The Street, USA Today, Washington Post and many others including specialty publications), track your packages (FedEx, UPS), find zip codes (several), find people (several), get driving directions (MapQuest), you can shop (Amazon, TicketMaster), locate the nearest StarBucks, receive medical information (several), travel information (many), restaurant and movie information (several), and the list goes on and on and on. By my count, there are more than 230 "web clipping" applications located at palm.net. Simply amazing.

This abundance of wireless information highlights one of the shortcomings of the VII, memory or lack thereof. The VII comes with 2 MEGS of RAM. This is for all of your standard applications, data and web clipping applications. Granted, web clipping applications are small, some as little as 1KB, but I've had to delete many applications to make room for more frequently used programs.

Other minuses, the Palm VII is expensive at around $500. The monthly service isn't cheap either and is based on message units received (no unlimited plan). Although the service begins at $9.99 per month, this is for 50KB worth of data. If you worked at it, you could use up this allocation in a day or two. The real "bargain," if you can call it that, is Palm.Net's introductory Volume Plan for $39.99 per month. This gives you 1000KB worth of data per month for six months. I tried to use all of my 1000KB data allocation last month and was unsuccessful. I was only able to use up 420KB. Additional "minuses" include not being able to receive your POP3 mail directly although ThinAirApps has a 3rd party workaround for this. Also, there is nothing to indicate "you've got mail," you have to put the antenna up to check.

Otherwise, I'd view the Palm VII as the most widely marketed and supported wireless data solution to date. It has its shortcomings, but if you're comfortable with the cost, the Palm VII is a good wireless data solution for beginners and for advanced users.

Pluses:

Nicely integrated package. Lots of useful wireless content. 3rd party software support. Synchronizes with your desktop easily.

Minuses:

Cost.

Memory or lack thereof. Difficult to access your POP3 email.

Must have hardware / software for your VII:

PocketMail BackFlip for wireline email from anywhere in the world. WeSync software for group scheduling. AvantGo software for "connected". GoType keyboard for entering those long documents.

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Internet access especially useful when travelling, April 5, 2000

By 

J. G. Heiser (Sunninghill, Berks) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PalmOne VII Handheld (Office Product)

I've spent 6 months with the Palm VII my wife bought me for my birthday and I'm satisfied with it.

In spite of being a disk pig who has used up over 4 Gigs of space on his laptop with data and programs, I've had no problem living within the 2 Meg memory of the VII. My favorite add-on programs are DateBook3 and STRIP, which I use to store passwords. I still have room for Tealdoc, a couple chapters of a book, and hundreds of contacts and reminders.

I have installed dozens of web applets, but I'm not a heavy user of the Internet and rarely exceed the lowest rate of $9.95. The web clipping applets are very stingy with data, making them economical to use even with the relatively expensive per byte rate. I've found Internet access especially useful for checking traffic conditions, getting weather reports, and checking on arrival times for planes when meeting someone. I also use the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and sometimes use the GoNetwork translator as a 5-language foreign dictionary. Want to know what's playing in your neighborhood, but you don't have the newspaper? Look it up on your Palm on Moviefone.

The VII really comes into its own when travelling. Having access to driving directions or phone numbers is a big convenience, and when returning to DFW, it helps to be able to tell the taxi driver what gate your flight is leaving from so you can be dropped off at the correct terminal building. Even if you do your reticketing through the airline or an agent, it is useful to pull down a schedule first. Ever been in a hotel room without "USA Today" and not known what was on TV? Look it on your VII with Rick-T-Land.

I rarely use iMail, and normally limit it to outgoing messages. I've configured it so my return address is my normal work address, and only give my palm.net address out when I explicitly want someone to address mail to my PDA. (I have such a heavy volume of mail that it would be hopeless to ever use a Palm to read it). It's cool to send a message home when you are waiting to board a plane. Although I used Amazon's applet to buy a book once, I don't trade stock with my Palm. It might be useful to buy entertainment tickets, but I never have.

I assume that someday I will need more than the 2Megs available in this device, but by then, there will probably be some newer color version (at a premium price). For now, having access to the Internet makes up for the reduced memory. You don't need to download that foreign language dictionary--just query one on the web. If you finish the book you brought, download another one.

The VII really comes into its own when you are outside of the office, or don't have immediate access to a web browser. It also has major prestige value. The next time you get into an argument over what movie Minnie Driver was in before "Good Will Hunting," you can be the one to whip out the wireless PDA and impress your friends by finding the answer on the Internet Movie Database.

To be honest, I think most people won't have the quality of their life greatly affected one way or the other just by having a Starbucks locator hanging from their belt, but it is fun. Not everyone will be able to live with the memory constraints of the VII, and it can't synch with your laptop using the IR port (carry the synch cable in your laptop case). I still have plenty of RAM left, though, and I have lots of calendar entries, notes, and contacts that I synchronize with Outlook. I'm very pleased with the Pocket Mirror synchronization applet, also. I was able to drill down into the configuration and set it so that the categories I had already defined on my Palm were uploaded to Outlook on my laptop. Very convenient.

Favorite accessory: Black leather case on a quick-release belt clip.