A Palm device in 1999

THE QUEST to develop a small, practical, affordable hand-held computer for average users has produced failure after failure.

Either the products were aimed at a mass audience and just flopped, like Apple’s much-touted Newton, or they were limited to relatively small market niches, like Sharp’s Wizard organizer or Hewlett-Packard’s 200LX, which are favored largely by gadget-lovers willing to master their intricacies….

Finally, however, somebody has come up with a much better idea. It’s a new $299 gizmo called the Pilot, from Palm Computing, an innovative Los Altos, Calif., company that has recently become a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, the giant modem maker.

After testing the Pilot daily for a couple of months, I can say it is by far the best little computer I have ever seen and the only one I can imagine incorporating into my daily life. It has a few limitations, but Pilot is a breakthrough product. It is due in stores in a few weeks.

With the Pilot, Palm essentially created the market for the “personal digital assistant,”as they were then called. Palm then used its foothold to carve out another new market: smartphones, with the Palm Treo line and then the Centro.

But even before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 blew up the market for phones-as-computers, Palm had grown woefully stale. Its Treo barely changed as Americans grew enamored with the BlackBerry and then the iPhone. Palm became a laughingstock when it yanked the Foleo, a much-derided device that was a mix of a laptop and a smartphone. (Sound like the Blackberry Playbook ?)

Palm did win some raves when it introduced a new smartphone operating system in 2009, but it proved too little, too late. Now, even if the Palm software is a winner, it will be H-P that will notch the victory.

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New Sprint Palm Treo 800w mobile phone

New Sprint Palm Treo 800w mobile phone , And all the publicity, and Apple's latest furor over the iPhone, announced today that too seriously in the business of the new Treo 800 device convergence Watt, a high-speed EV - DO Treo 800-watt, the Rev.The The Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional smartphone adoption is included. 802.11b / g WiFi and built-in Internet Explorer Mobile. The one-touch Wi - Fi] button to instantly connect users of Wi - Fi hotspots retrieve. This, Treo 800 watts immediately, to browse the Web, send and e-mail at the speed of broadband receiver -3 .1 M bps in a 1 .8 M bps upload and download rate.

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