Palm Inc., maker of the most popular personal digital assistants (PDAs), is solidifying its position with a makeover of its product line by increasing the speed and utility of the devices from its entry-level Palm III to the high-end Palm V and bundling e-book software in the high-end devices. The Santa Clara, Calif.—based company claims a 60% share of the handheld market, with 10 million Palm devices competing at the low end against the Handspring Visor (installed base: three million), which licenses the Palm operating system, and at the high end against the Microsoft PocketPC devices. Palm plans to renew its hold on the market by adding features that appeal to the young, mobile businesspeople who first made the PDA popular.
The first new Palm to hit the market will be the m105, replacing the entry-level IIIxe. The m105, scheduled to be available around April 1 for $199, comes with 8 megabytes of memory and includes Palm's Mobile Internet Kit, which allows wireless Net access by using a cell phone as a modem. A few weeks later, the $399 monochrome m500 and $445 16-bit color screen m505 will begin to supplant the Palm Vx, combining a USB port with a long-awaited expansion slot, in this case a Secure Digital (SD) card, and a lithium/polymer battery claimed to be good for two to three weeks on a charge. Different models of the postage-stamp-size SD card currently hold from 8 to 256 megabytes of storage.
Each new 500-series machine will also include the Peanut Reader e-book software, a version of the reader currently available by download from Peanutpress.com of Maynard, Mass., that has produced the biggest sales figures for e-books, and two Peanut titles, a business book and a science fiction titles.
Mike Segroves, Peanut's v-p of sales and marketing, reports that three of Peanut's top five bestsellers in 2000 were business books, "reflecting the interests of the largest class of PDA users, technically oriented business people, who also tend to be science fiction fans." Segroves says that while Stephen King's Riding the Bullet was by far Peanut's biggest seller, "it doesn't account for more than half" of the 50,000 e-books that made up the company's top 25 titles last year. Peanut currently sells about 500 e-books a day, with prices ranging from $1 to $35, but averaging about $7. "And that's with people required to download the reader on their own," Segroves said. "We expect that to increase a lot with the software included in the box on every purchase."
