HARDWARE
The Gist: Your Visor Goes Wi-fi
$299
Plug-and-play has never been better. I stuck Xircom's Ethernet module into my Visor, and in fewer than 60 seconds my handheld was talking to my AirPort base station at 11 Mbps - sharing the network's high-speed Internet connection.
The SpringPort communicates either in 40- or 128-bit crypto or in cleartext, with no noticeable performance penalty even in its most secure mode. Before installing the module, I searched for apps it would enable, but this was overplanning. It comes preloaded with Blazer, a robust Palm OS graphical browser that navigated my favorite blogs, news sites, and etailers without difficulty; it also has MultiMail SE, a reader that syncs with your desktop's Outlook or Eudora. A spare 100K on the cartridge is plenty of room for a telnet app or an IRC client. Because all this is on the module itself, the time between tearing off the shrink-wrap and having your mind blown is minuscule.
Make no mistake: A PDA with an 11-Mbyte wireless Web connection is a total mindblower. While Palm OS users have been able to connect to the Net via various kludgey interfaces - from cabled-in cell modems to metered services like Ricochet and OmniSky - it wasn't until my PDA joined my home network as an unlimited-use peer that it felt like a genuinely useful appliance. And knowing I'd be spared the usual login delays, I began to reach for it instead of my laptop to check my mail.
Of course, a SpringPort module is useful only if you have a Wi-Fi network to connect to. But you can publish a wireless LAN on the cheap off your iBook by adding a $99 AirPort card. Or, spend $200-plus to buy any one of a number of access points that act as both addressable network clients and wireless hubs. Wi-Fi renegades have set up high-power, semilegal base stations in their homes, leaving them wide open for neighborhood use (see www.bawug.org), and airports, coffee joints, and biz hotels are installing legitimate networks for public consumption.
If you have an Edge or a Prism, the SpringPort charges its internal battery off your Visor's cradle. Otherwise, you need to use the included power cable. Either way, it takes two hours to charge up. The battery life is a tad unstable, sometimes lasting several hours and sometimes less than an hour. Notably missing from the package is a case. More significant is the module's inability to automatically discover nearby 802.11 networks - you need to manually enter the network ID for the base station you want to connect to. This killed my fantasy of lurking outside SFO's Admiral's Club to download mail via the members-only Wi-Fi network. Xircom promises to include this functionality in a firmware update. I'm on tenterhooks.
Xircom: www.xircom.com.
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