.KEYWORD aprodyear
.FLYINGHEAD EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARDS
.TITLE Products of the Year 1998
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT aprodyear-cover.gif
.SUMMARY When we set out to do our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards, it was in part because we had observed a number of new products for the Palm computer that were clearly exceptional. In this first section of the Editors’ Choice Awards, called the Products of the Year, we show you the truly best of the best.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
When we set out to do our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards, it was in part because we had observed a number of new products for the Palm computer that were clearly exceptional. In this first section of the Editors’ Choice Awards, called the Products of the Year, we’ll show you the truly best of the best.
Our judging criteria for the Products of the Year was simple, yet brutal. To be considered, a candidate product had to have transformed the Palm device into something more, something unexpected, something exceptional. There are many products that improve upon the Palm device’s functionality and add features. Many of these will be honored in the Cool Tools or Fun Gadgets segments of the awards. But to be chosen as one of those few who had Product of the Year stature, the candidate product had to take the Palm device into new directions — and do it elegantly, cleanly, and be ultimately usable.
Eventually, we sifted through all the candidates to arrive at five winners: three hardware products and two software products. Without further ado, the winners are:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET AvantGo Client from AvantGo
.BULLET GoType! from LandWare
.BULLET UniMount from Revolve Design
.BULLET Earthmate from DeLorme
.BULLET OmniRemote from Pacific Neo-Tek
.END_LIST
We’ll begin and end with the Software Products of the Year, and discuss the Hardware Products of the Year in between.
.H1 AvantGo Client from AvantGo
We have to ‘fess up. When we first heard about AvantGo (initially from a company called Bombadier Software, eventually to be renamed to AvantGo), we thought it was, well, a bomb. The idea of downloading Web pages to the Palm computer for offline viewing seemed, honestly, silly. After all, Web pages are full of graphics and color, are designed to be read at resolutions of 800×600 or more (or at the very least 640×480), and were linked to lots of other Web pages. It just couldn’t be practical to read Web pages on a Palm device, let alone download them and walk around with them. You’d definitely need one of those 8 megabyte upgrade cards! And finally, why would you ever want to squint to read Web pages on your Palm computer when you’ve got bigger screens that are easier to read?
Uh, well, we were wrong. AvantGo is anything but silly and the thing really works, as shown in Figure A. Frankly, we were blown away.
.FIG A You can read Web pages on your Palm computer.
When you install AvantGo (and the v1.1 client software is free from AvantGo), you also subscribe to a series of AvantGo "channels". These are Web pages that are automatically downloaded each time you HotSync your Palm computer. A whole bunch of channels have been developed for AvantGo, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and, ahem, our competitors, Mobile Computing and Pen Computing magazines.
We’re told that developing AvantGo specific channels is not an enormous effort. What’s required is to restructure your HTML pages, reduce the graphic content, filter out the fluff, and keep the number of externally reachable links to a minimum. In fact, we were so impressed with AvantGo that we’ll be updating our proprietary, automated journal production system to create AvantGo pages at some point in the near future.
If AvantGo were just able to download these pre-built "premium" channels, it would be a nice product, but not really a Product of the Year contender. The thing is, you can also download any Web page you want — although you should expect mixed results. For example, some industrious readers took it upon themselves to specify the PalmPower News Center as a download source, and now they get those pages, updated every day.
One cool example I personally enjoy is the movie listings. There’s a big Loew’s Cinema in New Brunswick that I like to go to. Each day, I download the latest listings and movie times to my Palm organizer — that is, AvantGo downloads this information automatically so I don’t have to think about it. Then, if I’m out with friends and we decide to go to a movie, I can whip out my trusty organizer and have the latest movie times. Not only does it make for cool bragging rights, it also makes it way easier to choose movies and times.
The look of non-customized pages is a bit spotty. You do "takes your chances", depending on the complexity of the source pages. But we found that more pages work than don’t, and that’s impressive.
Oh, and the answer to why you’d want to read Web pages on your Palm screen. Simple. Can you say "waiting room"?
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H2 What about the Palm VII "web clippings"?
Many of you may have noticed some apparent competition between the Palm VII’s forthcoming "web clippings" and AvantGo. As far as we can tell, these are different beasts. First, of course, you can get AvantGo for your existing Palm device for free. No need to buy a wireless unit. Second, AvantGo connects to data at HotSync time and does not incur wireless per-minute charges. And third, and potentially hugely different, it appears Palm Computing is having some role in choosing what you get to see, as the following statement from the Palm announcement seems to imply:
"Upon submission to the Palm.Net site, a query application will be reviewed and tested for quality assurance by Palm Computing. If approved, the query application will be placed in the public area within the Palm.Net site and made available to customers both for keyword search and download."
.END_SIDEBAR
.PAGE
.H1 GoType! Keyboard from LandWare
The buzz on the GoType! keyboard was intense. We kept getting reports of a keyboard for the Palm device months before the company officially announced anything. Readers were constantly asking about it. Even though LandWare had, for quite some time, offered PiloKey, a link between the Newton keyboard and the Palm device, clearly it wasn’t enough.
PiloKey wasn’t a great solution for a number of reasons. First, you needed to get your paws on a Newton keyboard, and they’re in short supply ever since Apple booted the Newton into oblivion. Second, you needed a HotSync cable or a crandle. And you had to hook it all up, prop up the Palm device, and so forth. It worked, but it was a kludge.
But then came the GoType!, shown in Figure B. GoType! is simple and well designed. You just open the clamshell case, plop the Palm device into the keyboard’s own cradle, and type away.
.FIGPAIR B You can type anything you want on the GoType! keyboard.
There are a couple of minor quibbles about this product. First, many readers report that the right shift key and the tab key should be reversed, and others suggest the up-arrow and shift key should be reversed. Second (and this could be an issue), there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to use the GoType! keyboard with a modem or wireless solution, so one of the more obvious uses — connecting to the Internet for email and such — might not be aided by the keyboard.
But these criticisms are quibbles. GoType! is a fine device and definitely worthy of Product of the Year honors.
.H1 UniMount from Revolve Design
The day the UniMount arrived, we were like kids in a candy store. Here was this box with all sorts of cool little plastic mounting brackets and connectors and doohickeys of all varieties. It was like getting an Erector Set for the Palm device.
Simply described, UniMount, shown in Figure C, is a universal mounting system for your Palm computer. It makes it possible to mount your Palm device so it’s visible and reachable from the driver’s seat of a car, from the dashboard of a golf cart, or even nicely displayed on your desk.
.FIGPAIR C With UniMount, you can mount your Palm device just about anywhere you want.
What impressed us most about the UniMount was the care taken in its industrial design. It’s a modular system that fits with the standard modular mounting systems available for automobiles. It can be easily reconfigured for different vehicles and uses. The Palm device easily snaps in and removes without any fuss or difficulty. Also, it’s possible to quickly release the entire mounting assembly and move it to a different location.
All in all, the UniMount is flexible, sturdy, and very well designed.
.H1 Earthmate from DeLorme
OK, so you’ve got your Palm device mounted all nice and pretty-like in your car using the UniMount. You’ve your cellular phone to call your customer to tell him you’ll be a bit late because you’re lost. Your customer can’t help you get there, because he doesn’t have any idea where you are right now. What do you do? What do you do? (Our sincerest apologies to Keanu Reeves and the producers of "Speed" for overusing those lines, but we just love ’em.)
What you do is plug in the Earthmate GPS receiver, shown in Figure D, into your Palm device, wait a few seconds, and then follow the directions shown on your Palm organizer’s screen.
.FIG D Like the Palm computer, Earthmate is small enough to fit in your pocket (although, where did he hide all that wire?)
Earthmate is a GPS system that plugs into the Palm computer. You download trips into the Palm’s memory and then, as you’re driving, the Earthmate constantly updates your position. The next leg of your trip is automatically updated as you drive.
The Earthmate receiver is just about the same size as the Palm device. A (long) cable runs between the two. Once plugged in, with trip routing downloaded, your Palm computer becomes an instant homing pigeon.
This is quite an impressive solution, although, honestly, we had reservations about granting it Product of the Year honors. Although we’ve had numerous happy reader reports and our authors also reported very positive results, here in our little patch of Central New Jersey, we’ve never been able to get the Earthmate to work, even after sent us a replacement device. However, the highly enthusiastic reader letters swayed us, and it is a truly transformative solution — so we granted the award anyway. Some time soon, we’ll figure out how to make the thing work for us.
.H1 OmniRemote from Pacific Neo-Tek
It was on the front page of USA Today. The Palm computer was intercepting keyless entry codes and making it possible to break into cars. And the culprit? The enabling technology? The software was called OmniRemote, a product that turned the Palm computer into a learning remote control.
Well, USA Today (and all the other press who jumped on the bandwagon) blew things way out of proportion. Certain keyless entry systems use IR beams to open door locks. But capturing the IR signal requires line of site, a steady hand, and a few, very obvious seconds. It’s not something you’re going to do in a stealthy way. Also, this is not a unique feature of the Palm device. Instead, any learning remote control can learn an IR signal. Sometimes our esteemed fourth estate needs to do some more homework.
That said, OmniRemote is cool beans. This little chunk of code turns a Palm III or a PalmPilot with the Palm III Upgrade Card into a highly programmable remote control. For those of us with large home theatres, this is super slick. Granted, it’s pretty expensive to use a Palm III as a remote control. But there are competitive solutions, such as the Pronto, shown in Figure D, that cost even more.
.FIGPAIR E The $399 Pronto sure looks a heck of a lot like a Palm III, doesn’t it?
In any case, with OmniRemote, you can draw out buttons on your Palm organizer’s screen. Different categories mean different controls. You can record macros, resize buttons, and even have buttons that switch between categories. It’s a gadget geek nirvana.
Interestingly, the company tells us that the IR signal in the Palm III Upgrade Card, installed in the older PalmPilot devices, is stronger than that in the Palm III device itself. Also, if you’ve got a Palm computer that doesn’t have an IR signal, you can buy a little IR dongle from Pacific Neo-Tek.
OmniRemote is still clearly a first generation product. The user interface definitely needs some work. For example, if you delete a category (say for your VCR1), all the buttons go into the Unfiled category. I deleted all the pre-defined categories and had hundreds of buttons I needed to individually delete. Also, while you can use the Palm’s own hardware buttons to send signals, they’re common across categories. I would have preferred them to be able to be common across categories or unique per category, at my choice.
Again, though, these are small criticisms for a product that makes it possible to use the Palm computer in an entirely new way.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
.GRAPHICPAIR F The following products are Product of the Year winners.
AvantGo is available from http://www.avantgo.com.
GoType is available from http://www.landware.com.
UniMount is available from http://www.revolvedesign.com.
Earthmate is available from http://www.delorme.com.
OmniRemote is available from http://www.pacificneotek.com.
Pronto is available from http://www.mmhometheater.com/components/rvpronto.html.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6c7f2
